Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Willow Creek Community Church Turned to Archion

Archion Technologies, the media and entertainment provider of intelligent storage for content creation, exhibited their award winning Storage Area Network (SAN) Solutions at Worship for Facilities Conference and Expo (WFX) in Houston. Archion, founded in 1999, has become the storage standard for many of the leading Film Studios, Broadcasters, and Post Facilities throughout North America. In addition, Houses of Worship like Kenneth Copeland Ministries, Willow Creek Community Church, Gateway Church and others have turned to Archion for guidance on shared storage solutions.

Kenneth Copeland Ministries implemented Archion’s Alliance Pro’ SAN Storage Solution earlier in the year to enhance their HD workflows. "We went non linear about 4-5 years ago, and one challenge we ran into was that we were dealing with multiple manufacturers. We re-thought what we were doing, and we looked into Final Cut and Apple, but identified some aspects of Apple storage that did not match our particular needs and workflow," said Mr. Kelley Hemphill, Senior Technical Purchasing Agent, with Kenneth Copeland Ministries. "We continued looking into alternatives for storage. We ultimately decided to bundle Archion with our Final Cut systems, after we learned that Archion had a proven track record working with Avid and Apple systems. We decided to go with a SAN for the online storage, and recently added Archion’s Alliance Pro SAN Solution with 24 TB of storage capacity to our workflow."

Mr. Hemphill added:" Prior to installing Archion’s SAN, we could not get Final Cut to work effectively with our earlier NAS storage solution, so we made it our vault. We needed to set up a storage area network that could deliver the throughput, so Archion became our SAN for our Final Cuts. It’s working out great for us."

Willow Creek Community Church
originally invested in their Archion SAN back in 2007. "The Archion SAN integrated easily, has really streamlined our workflow and has run 24/7 since its installation," said Dave Cooke, Chief Video Engineer, Willow Creek Community Church. "We recently upgraded our Archion SAN because we had just added 4 additional Final Cut workstations, bringing our Editing workstation total to 10– all fiber connected to the Archion SAN. The new Archion SAN gave us 16TB more of much needed storage bringing our total to 20TB. The new SAN also supports 4GB bandwidth, so now we can edit in multiple suites in HD, without the previous bandwidth caps."
Cooke added:" We also just completed the switch to a tapeless workflow for recording our live service events. We now record Live directly into two Final Cut workstations, one in SD and one in HD, both recording directly to the SAN in real time. Once the service is over, these files are them immediately available for distribution to our regional campuses for playback and also are edited same day for DVD and web distribution. The full resolution service file is then uploaded from the Archion SAN to our Clear Story Digital Asset Management system for archive. No more recording to videotape."

"As part of the effort to enhance their post production workflows, these Houses of Worship needed to easily network their editing workstations while receiving a high level of performance", said Daniel Stern, EVP of Sales for Archion. "We were absolutely delighted to be able to exceed their performance requirements, keep their costs down, and share our decades of knowledge."