Mediaset Deploys DDN Multi-Petabyte Solution

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced that commercial broadcaster in Italy Mediaset has selected DDN’s S2A9900 storage platform to accelerate and consolidate its digital media workflow. As a long-term customer of DDN, this follow-on order represents a validation of DDN’s technology roadmap and the operational advantages of DDN technology for scalable broadcast organizations.

With 2009 revenue of €3.88 billion and 5,830 employees, Mediaset is a big broadcast organizations – the scale of the operation and amount of video which is managed and collaboratively edited is massive. This tremendous amount of video presents severe challenges to traditional storage platform providers in terms of stream bandwidth, concurrent streaming capability and video archive scalability. When selecting a solution for their next-generation media broadcast platform, Mediaset’s integration partner, MediaPower, needed technology that could scale to Mediaset’s growth.

"We are pleased to again select DataDirect Networks technology as the backbone of Mediaset’s mission-critical broadcast operations," said Marcello Dellepiane, President & CEO of MediaPower Group. "The process of a technology refresh gave us the chance to survey the market and understand all of our options, and we were very happy to find that DDN products continue to serve as the gold standard for streaming and capacity scalability to serve both our play-to-air and media archive requirements."

"Once again we are glad to select DataDirect Networks & MediaPower for our mission critical applications," said Mauro Cassanmagnago, Deputy General Manager & Engineering Director of Videotime SpA (Mediaset Group).

To address data management and distribution complexities, Mediaset selected the S2A9900 storage platform. Designed to meet the requirements of scalable and real-time video streaming, the S2A9900 features bandwidth, multi-petabyte scalability and quality of service to avoid frame dropping during routine disk drive failure recovery events. Capable of holding up to 600 hard drives in a data center rack as well as spinning down inactive hard drives during periods of inactivity, the S2A9900 is a leading media storage platform for capacity, energy and space efficiency.

"As the broadcast industry continues its conversion to higher-definition formats and considers revenue-enabling opportunities such as 3D, it is increasingly incumbent on these organizations to select a scalable platform which will allow them to grow with their business ambitions," said Paul Bloch, President and co-founder of DataDirect Networks. "We are extremely proud to provide the foundation upon which Mediaset builds their production broadcast workflow. This deployment serves as a reference architecture for organizations worldwide who are challenged with managing multi-Petabyte video storage infrastructures."