DDN MEDIAScaler Enables MLB Network to Speed Access to Archive

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that MLB Network has deployed DDN’s MEDIAScaler GS7K storage solution to accelerate and simplify its archive footage storage and access.

As a producer of HD Major League Baseball video content, MLB Network is a recognized in sports video asset management. MLB Network captures and catalogues multi-petabyte of digital information each year and manages an active archive repository of more than 40PB of storage. With the adoption of MEDIAScaler, MLB Network has simplified the management of its live and archived video assets, sped up content access times, and powered its ability to provide HD content wherever it is needed within the post-production environment.

“The ability to quickly access archived footage is critical to a high performance post production environment,” said Tab Butler, senior director of post-production and media management, MLB Network. “Being able to quickly produce content with historical footage combined with partial file restored clips from games is essential to supporting our business operations. With DDN’s MEDIAScaler, we’ve been able to simplify our disk storage management, while increasing our NAS within our archive system. The four 40 Gigabit ports on each GS7K controller enables faster access to content, while allowing more content to stream from more tape drives simultaneously, allowing us to scale to meet our growing needs.“

For the past several years, MLB Network, in collaboration among MLB entities, has built an asset management system, referred to as the DIAMOND System, which manages a 40PB tape-based archive system. The DIAMOND System captures and catalogs more than 500 hours of live video content per day, and preserves all MLB Network original programming as well as the vast digitized video library spanning more than 100 years of baseball. With the need for higher performance and larger scale, MLB Network was looking for a disk storage appliance to accelerate and streamline their DIAMOND asset management system. MLB Network selected MEDIAScaler storage, combined with an archive middleware, to create an efficient way to manage and access the digital content housed in the archive.

MEDIAScaler is a file-based storage solution for large-scale rich media workflows. It provides concurrent access to content across users while accelerating transcode, reducing hardware footprint and integrating with the cloud. It provides end-to-end digital content management and data protection in a single solution for large-scale environments of up to hundreds of petabytes and millions of IO/s, and enables media organizations such as MLB Network to cache numerous files on a performance platform.

“MEDIAScaler is delivering lowered maintenance costs, accelerated access times to content while simplifying management of the archive disk storage for MLB Network’s creative teams,” added Butler.