Viacom Bought EMC Isilon NL Systems

EMC Corporation announced that Viacom
International Media Networks (VIMN), a Viacom, Inc. company, has
standardized on EMC Isilon scale-out storage for all of its media content in
Europe.

VIMN is comprised of many multimedia entertainment brands, including MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central,
BET, Paramount Channel, VH1, VIVA, COLORS, Game One and Tr3’s MTV, Musica y
Mas, which are seen in more than 600 million households in 170
territories and 37 languages via more than 200 locally programmed and operated
TV channels. With more than two PB of Isilon storage, VIMN has improved the
speed and delivery of its multimedia content across Europe.

Customer Benefits

• Streamlined Content Publishing: With Isilon, VIMN accelerated content
  publishing 150% by streamlining content development, access,
  distribution and transmission.
• Efficiency: VIMN’s integration between
  Isilon, media asset management and playout systems automates flow of content to
  program schedules, reducing the number of operators per 25 channels from five
  to just one.
• Performance: Isilon
  delivers 8TB of content per day to 100 playout servers in each media
  center simultaneously, ensuring that content is available for daily program
  schedules.
• Enhanced Agility: Isilon enables VIMN to supply its creative teams with new storage
  resources in hours instead of weeks.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

VIMN’s prior distributed storage environment was difficult to scale and
limited in performance, affecting its ability to reliably deliver media content
to the broadcast channels. With media content growing by 600TB annually, VIMN
needed a centrally managed storage infrastructure integrated with its media
asset management system to streamline and simplify content access,
publishing and transmission.

After evaluating solutions from multiple storage vendors, VIMN chose Isilon scale-out storage for its scalability, performance
and reliability. VIMN deployed Isilon NL-Series systems to consolidate media
content from multiple sites across Europe to two primary media centers in
London and Amsterdam, providing nearline storage for a global, file-based
content delivery system. An additional Isilon system is deployed in VIMN’s
London content production environment, which also enables content delivery to
locations outside of Europe, including Australia.

Isilon InsightIQ analytics enables VIMN to optimize performance and
workflows, and forecast future storage needs. With Isilon’s OneFS file system,
VIMN maintains one global source of content for use with multiple reference
language tracks across all multimedia channels. For DR and
content sharing, VIMN is implementing Isilon SyncIQ software to replicate content between its two media centers.

VIMN’s Evertz Mediator media asset management, Grass Valley K2 Edge
integrated automated playout system and MediaGenex channel management systems
are integrated with the Isilon infrastructure.

Tim Bertioli, senior director, media and technology infrastructure,
Viacom International Media Networks, said: "Our international content workflow is now almost completely file-based –
access to content is streamlined for editing, compliance and desktop viewing.
As a result, we’ve accelerated time-to-publication of new international content
by 150%. By giving the channel teams more control over media content, Isilon
has enabled us to execute on a completely new content publishing model in the
broadcast industry.

"It’s absolutely critical
to our business to deliver complied, quality checked content to the networks in
as short a time as possible. With Isilon, we no longer worry about being able
to access the content for transmission in time. Isilon has given us real peace
of mind.

"Our annual EMA event, as
an example, is distributed to a potential global audience of over 600 million
homes. It’s vital that we are able to create and distribute multiple versions
of the show for linear, mobile and on-demand viewing quickly – centralizing our
storage for the different stages of our file-based workflow makes this
possible.

"For our content
production system in London, we can handle administration with one less
full-time engineer because of Isilon’s streamlined manageability and
reliability. Overall, one engineer spends about an hour per week managing
Isilon and we’re saving a substantial sum per year in support costs. We pretty
much just leave Isilon alone."

Roderick Aal, VP technology, North and UK, Viacom International
Media Networks, said: "Adopting the
Isilon OneFS storage solution enables VIMN to store more content in more
formats and make it instantly accessible simultaneously to more people at a
lower cost than done before on linear tape-open digital file based tape
storage.

"The Isilon OneFS storage
solution has not just reduced costs, but has allowed us to make video content,
such as video on demand, instantly accessible to more people at a lower cost.
We’ve also been able to allow disparate applications and clients to share a
single pool of storage that all users can access instantly and accelerate ROI
on storage. Ultimately, VIMN has adopted a storage solution optimized
specifically for the unique requirements of digital content, enabling us to
store more content in more formats.

"In general, Isilon OneFS
has enabled our businesses to use a common storage solution across multiple
applications in the digital content lifecycle including production, archiving
and delivery."