UK ITV Adopting Nexsan

Nexsan Technologies Corp. announced that ITV, the biggest commercial television network in the UK, has increased the storage capacity and performance for its online broadcasting site, ITV.com, by 20 percent with the high-density SATABeast Xi. Using Nexsan’s evolutionary AutoMAID (Automatic Massive Array of Idle Disks) energy saving technology, ITV.com has also dramatically reduced overall datacenter power consumption and cooling costs without compromising online editing productivity.

 
The ITV Network is made up of 15 regional licenses, providing television to viewers across the UK. ITV Network is responsible for the commissioning, scheduling and marketing of network programs on ITV. Programs from ITV are provided by ITV’s in-house production unit and by the independent sector. Network programming covers a full range of genres, including drama, entertainment, news, current affairs factual, sport and children’s programming. This ensures that viewers across the UK are able to share in viewing some of the UK’s favorite programs.

The ITV.com online broadcasting site relies on its team of production editors which use the Apple Final Cut Studio 2 editing platform to prepare programs for the site. Because they are producing an increasing number of unique online video content, ITV.com found that it was rapidly stretching its existing 25TB storage infrastructure to the limits. To assure that the high-volume site was efficiently architected, ITV.com sought high-density storage systems that provided energy savings without impacting performance. With its new environment, ITV.com planned to grow its storage capacity to 100TB and increase performance without expanding its limited datacenter space.

“Our challenge was to increase the capacity from 25TB to 100TB and consolidate storage for our multiple online platforms into a single storage solution,” said Chris Wood, Technical Manager for ITV Future Technologies. “It was also important to push the boundaries of what was possible with the platform to minimize unnecessary infrastructure expansion.”

While ease of use, energy savings and performance were all critical decision factors, the requirement that was most difficult to meet was the footprint needed to house ITV.com’s desired 100TB of capacity. Of the solutions available to support a high-performance Apple environment, most would require up to 39U of rack space to deliver the capacity the broadcaster required. This would not only max-out their datacenter space, it would have also caused unacceptable heating and energy usage levels.

“The SATABeast Xi easily met our capacity needs in just three 4U units with advanced AutoMAID technology for additional energy conservation,” said Wood. “And the performance is exceptional. We can achieve 1,200 MB per second on a single unit, and nearly 3,000 MB per second across the three. It is a truly powerful storage solution for a high-volume, high performance online editing environment. It surpasses our production editing needs in every way, both today and into tomorrow.”

The SATABeast Xi is the highest density storage solution available in the Mac market today. It provides up to 42TB of storage in only 4U of rack space and is the only one of its caliber in the Xserve market to feature MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology. Nexsan’s AutoMAID allows SATABeast Xi to place its disk drives in a progressively more idle state based on user and application need to conserve energy yet provide near-instantaneous access to data. AutoMAID’s progressive settings make it ideal for multi-user systems with multiple applications like rich media, imaging, email, and many other business applications.