SAN Solutions Selected for NBC’s “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon”

SAN Solutions, Inc., architect of enterprise-class network storage infrastructures for the media and entertainment markets, announced that its Video Production SAN is being used by Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video Entertainment and NBC’s Universal Media Studios to support production of ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.’

Providing centralized storage for the popular late-night show, the SAN Solutions system supports a highly streamlined file-based workflow from end to end and enables rapid preparation and delivery of the program to secondary markets.

"We found SAN Solutions’ Video Production SAN to be a reliable and exceptionally valuable part of our workflow for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ so it made sense to invest in a second SAN Solutions system for our launch of ‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon‘ earlier this year," said Stacey Foster, coordinating producer at Broadway Video Entertainment. "Working with this new Video Production SAN, we’ve streamlined our production operations to the ultimate degree. The storage system allows us to work on a single instance of media throughout the lifecycle of the show, and the resulting speed of production is critical to our ability to meet the stringent demands of timely delivery to other outlets and markets."

‘Late Night with Jimmy Fallon‘ is broadcast weeknights on NBC and delivered as a follow-on to outlets including Hulu, Comedy Central, and the BBC. The comedy-talk franchise, with Fallon as its third host, is taped before a live audience at NBC’s Rockefeller Center Studio 6B and incorporates comedy, music, and interviews with A-list talent.

Installed prior to the March 2 broadcast debut of the show, the SAN Solutions Video Production SAN provides 35 TB of usable storage for video and 10 TB of usable storage for audio, with both systems configured for RAID-6 protection. The SAN Solutions storage subsystem also offers 60 TB (usable) of RAID-6-configured nearline storage.

The scalable centralized storage system from SAN Solutions currently supports 30 seats, making media from eight studio cameras, four audio ingest systems, two segment playout machines, and stored graphics, photographs, and sound effects readily available to creative staff at Final Cut Pro, ProTools, and Adobe graphics stations. The Video Production SAN also is linked to a media transformation server farm and LTO backup. A fully multipathed fiber channel fabric back to the storage controllers helps to maximize bandwidth use and ensure high-performance operation within the shared, collaborative environment. Because media is stored centrally and available to multiple simultaneous users, production is not slowed by tedious or time-consuming data transfer and media-handling tasks that typically limit efficiency and productivity.

Broadway Video Entertainment worked with NBC engineers and the SAN Solutions team to implement the new storage system according to the show’s particular performance and capacity needs. In addition to designing, procuring, and integrating best-of-breed systems tailored to the show, SAN Solutions provides ongoing 24/7 support for the entire storage system.