Dutch Public Broadcasting Agency Selects Nexenta Software

NPO ICT, the IT department of the Dutch Public Broadcasting Agency NPO (Nederlandse Publieke Omroep), has selected Inprove’s Open Storage solution, powered by Nexenta Systems, Inc.’s NexentaStor software, for storing and delivering television programs available via the website of UitzendingGemist (MissedBroadcasts), now capable of managing data that continues to double annually at a lower cost.

UitzendingGemist is one of the most data intensive websites in the Netherlands, with very dense Internet traffic. The website has existed for over 10 years and has approximately 80 terabytes (TB) of video available to Internet users who want to watch previously broadcasted television programs. During an average evening, between 10 and 20,000 people stream data, adding up to over 10 GigaBytes (GB) in capacity.

“Our record is 25GB,” said Wietse Muizelaar, hosting team leader, NPO ICT. “All of this data must be stored and readily available as it continues to grow every day, and in more formats. Think mobile for instance – to manage this environment, a robust and scalable infrastructure is essential. This infrastructure also must be cost effective, as NPO should spend public resources in a prudent way.”

The storage solution NPO ICT was using reached its capacity, so it began looking for new Media Streaming Storage for UitzendingGemist and other websites. Requirements for a new solution included: high availability, scalability to an annual data growth of over 50 percent, competitive costs per TB, low power consumption, and 24×7 first-class support.

After a process that involved multiple vendors, NPO selected the Inprove’s Open Storage solution, based on NexentaStor. “The two deciding factors were performance and price, as the alternative vendors did not compare to Inprove’s performance, and were more expensive per TB. We looked into the total cost of ownership, not just the purchase cost, but also operational elements such as support and power. We have worked with the system for several months now, and uptime is 100 percent so far.”

Another important aspect is that power consumption is significantly lower than that of competing products. Dick Snippe, Internet manager, NPO ICT explains: “The Open Storage solution offered by Inprove is based on Nexenta with the ZFS File System. This not only provides high scalability but also a smart middle layer of energy efficient Solid State Disks (SSDs) for fast reading of data. This allows Nexenta to run large, slowly rotating storage disks that consume little power.” As Nexenta is based on open standards, industry standard components such as hard disks can be used. This also makes the solution very cost effective.

“NPO ICT required a leading-edge solution to serve the fast-growing streaming television needs of the Netherlands; NPO did a thorough evaluation, and we are extremely pleased that NexentaStor has been selected on the basis of superior performance as well as TCO savings with special emphasis on large power savings,” said Evan Powell, CEO of Nexenta. “With Inprove’s ability to tune and expand the system over time and Nexenta’s ever-growing product line, NPO ICT will be able to scale to meet demand for years to come.”

Inprove has NPO ICT equipped with an NXA Nexenta Storage Cluster System with 192TB of storage drives and a high-performance 1.9TB SSD read cache, all powered by the ZFS-based NexentaStor Unifed Storage solution. Inprove created the configuration, implemented the solution, and agreed with NPO ICT on a four-year Gold 24×7 on-site support contract.