Crossroads StrongBox Data Protection Appliance Installed by WXEL-TV

Crossroads Systems, Inc.  announced that WXEL-TV, an affiliate of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), has deployed the Crossroads StrongBox data protection appliance for long-term preservation of its video content.

WXEL-TV is the second PBS affiliated station to turn to Crossroads for a video archive solution.

The West Palm Beach, FL-based station offers its Palm Beach and Treasure Coast viewers HD content. The increasing use of HD technology requires more and more storage capacity as video content is created and produced. Previously relying solely on high-erformance disk storage, the station’s engineers were facing ever-growing costs and complexity in the expanding storage environment.

The station chose StrongBox to address its scalability and budget challenges related to video preservation. WXEL-TV was able to deploy StrongBox instead of spinning disk for more than 100TB of content, gaining the benefits of:

• Reduced TCO
• An always-online file system
• Long-term protection of all video content
• Simple, low-cost archiving that fit within the existing environment
• A ‘green’ approach that reduced dependence on spinning disk

“StrongBox acts like a HDD, but provides the cost savings and protection of tape – and that’s what makes it so simple for the station to use,” said Kevin Howie, director of engineering, WXEL-TV. “It was an easy decision to deploy StrongBox. Not only does it reduce our energy consumption, but it offers us the scalability, accessibility and automation that we need for our content. We used to face the daunting scenario of being forced to delete programs in order to make room for up to one TB of new video each day. With StrongBox, that’s a problem we will never face again.“

“The StrongBox appliance continues to receive praise from the media and entertainment industry for its low TCO and easy management of fast-growing video archives,” said David Cerf, EVP of strategy and business development, Crossroads. “We’re pleased to provide organizations such as WXEL-TV with archive technology that interfaces with their primary storage and cost-effectively addresses the scalability needed in a broadcast environment.“