Thecus 10GbE NAS for Seoul Broadcasting System

The Challenge
Working in the TV media industry, stories and story-lines need to be filmed and produced at high speed. What only has a minute of screen time, may often have taken hours to produce. Substantial amounts of film need to be recorded daily, to guarantee that the all content that is necessary is captured. This sizeable amount of footage often needs to be recorded from multiple locations outside a company’s studio each day. For the team at Korean TV channel Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), their footage after filming also had to be sent to the SBS HQs to be backed up to their main server, then sent to the other side of the city to their media center to be edited. It was paramount for SBS to find an alternative that provided a more efficient and less time demanding approach to moving their data, while keeping their footage secure.

Faced with this dilemma, SBS contacted Thecus Technology Corp.‘ South Korean Partner Best Tech System to help solve and reduce the large periods of long transfers and backup  times.

The Solution
Upon diagnosis of the issues with their current system, it was quickly ascertained that the deployment of the N8850 would improve the data transfer rate, backup, and recovery speed. The N8850’s key functionality is it’s 10GbE capability. A 10GbE connection offers data speeds up to 10 billion bits per second, it is a game changer for businesses that require high-speed backup and data transfer for an ever-growing amount of data, reducing waiting time and thus enhance productivity. As the SBS team is mobile filming at multiple locations throughout the South Korean peninsula, the concept of each of the teams installing NAS into their vehicles was realized.

Equipping the SBS Fleet
The SBS team had 12 vehicles in their fleet that were equipped with one N8850 each, in each configuration 8 Seagate 3TB HDDs were installed, providing each vehicle with 24TB of storage, leaving room for scalability in the future. To ensure data redundancy, which was essential for SBS, the N8850 delivers RAID mode compatibility (0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50, 60 and JBOD).  Bundled with free Intel antivirus software, each NAS was armed with software protection.

To access the 10GbE functionality, SBS installed Intel dual-port 10GbE cards in each of the systems. Regarding the hardware, the N8850 is powered by the Intel Core i3 2120 processor, with memory expandable to 32GB of DDR3 RAM. For the new teams to interact with the NAS, the user-friendly front panel was a godsend. The panel contains an interface that monitors the NAS operations, allowing the team to know what the NAS is doing and become aware if a problem occurs.

The introduction of the N8850 has been a step forward in productivity for the SBS team. This configuration delivered an increase in efficiency and decreased in time spent, which means that they are more productive and able to provide more powerful content to their viewers.