Isilon IQ to Support Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium

Isilon Systems, Inc. announced that Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, the official Canadian broadcaster of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (Feb. 12-28), has selected Isilon IQ as the primary repository for all of its Winter Games raw footage and video package content. With Isilon, the Consortium will be able to unify hundreds of hours of broadcast coverage onto a single, high-performance and highly scalable shared pool of storage. This will enable concurrent, multi-user access to content across the network, accelerating real-time editing and speeding content delivery.

"Our unprecedented multi-platform coverage of Vancouver 2010 will provide consumers with more choices than ever before. Canadians will be able to watch what they want, when they want, and how they want," said Mike Kozlakowski, senior manager, media technology systems at CTV, Canada’s Olympic Network and leading broadcaster within the Consortium. "To achieve such a feat, we need a storage system that provides highly concurrent content access to our users without sacrificing performance or ease of use. With Isilon, we have exactly that – a solution already proven in our own 24x7x365 operations to be capable of delivering in an environment as intense as the Winter Games."

During the Winter Games, the Consortium will deploy Isilon IQ as the central content repository for its proprietary Video Gateway broadcast portal, creating a single, shared pool of storage for all content to streamline ingest, encoding, editing, and delivery of both live and pre-packaged coverage. With Isilon, the Consortium team on-site can access the same content from multiple locations and protocols, enabling users to simultaneously utilize the same content in real-time, dramatically accelerating time-to-air.

"This Winter Games will raise the bar yet again for broadcast coverage, as the proliferation of mediums, formats and delivery methods continues to increase in-step with audience demand," said Sam Grocott, senior director of product management, Isilon Systems. "The Consortium’s first-of-its-kind Olympic Games broadcast operations are simply too demanding and data-intensive for traditional storage systems. By using Isilon IQ to power its Olympic Games coverage, the Consortium is demonstrating that for the leading edge of broadcasting, Isilon is the solution."

CTV currently uses Isilon scale-out NAS as the primary storage system supporting its 24x7x365 Canadian broadcast operations, including integration with Harris Nexio servers for high definition content, as well as all standard definition media. In partnership with value-added reseller Applied Electronics, CTV has deployed numerous Isilon IQ clusters to provide its users with unfettered, highly concurrent media access, eliminating the inherent inefficiency and data fragmentation of its previous SAN storage system. With Isilon IQ, CTV is utilizing 95 percent of its storage capacity with no degradation of performance, maximizing its storage investment and significantly increasing workflow productivity.