365 Media in Iceland Chooses Coraid

Coraid Inc, a developer of Ethernet storage
solutions, announced that it has been chosen by 365 Media, a
mass media company in Iceland, to provide storage for
its television and radio broadcast.

365 Media operates ten
television channels, five radio stations and Iceland’s largest newspaper.
To supply content to its traditional broadcast and IP-based services, 365 Media
adds over 35 hours of new video content into its archives every day.  It
therefore comes as no surprise that over the last few years the company has
seen its storage requirements more than double and according to Arni Finnsson,
technology manager at 365 Media, its storage archive will likely exceed a petabyte of
digital content by 2014.

To cope with this
growth in demand and changes in production formats such as the increased
adoption of HD video, 365 Media wanted its storage platform to provide
higher performance and the ability to scale.
For the company, it was a complex decision. Initially it considered building a
file archive using commodity hardware and its own in-house technical resource
but it then decided against it.

As Finnsson explained: "We
discounted this idea fairly quickly as although it was feasible, we did not
want to turn into a software and systems development house. We serve up content
24/7, so if there is any problem with the storage platform, we would need
access to skilled technical support that can provide an immediate solution.
Running it ourselves just wouldn’t have been practical. We also considered
working with traditional broadcast-focused storage providers such as Ominion
and EMC Isilon. However, we are growing rapidly and the cost per terabyte of both
these solutions was higher than we could fit within our budget."

After reviewing
storage systems that had traditionally been considered enterprise grade, 365
Media selected the Coraid SP3000 server with SRX4200 storage arrays.

As Finnsson added: "Coraid appealed
to us because it offered a good balance between throughput, scalability and
price that we could not find anywhere else. It also offers a user-friendly
architecture that supports HA and that would be easy for us to operate. Like
most organisations in the M&E space we have a constant need for growing
amounts of high-performance, scalable storage and, as Coraid uses standard
Ethernet technology, it has also given us a clear upgrade path from 1Gb to 10Gb
and eventually to 40Gb if we need it."

Within six months, 365
Media had filled 80% of the initial 180TB capacity. Coraid provided a second
SP3000 server and four additional SRX4200 storage arrays. The system was also
upgraded from a 1GbE to a 10GbE connection using the same core chassis with an Ethernet card and driver upgrade. This in-line upgrade process has
allowed for a smoother and more cost-effective transition for 365 Media and has
led to no unplanned downtime in nine months.

Pete Godden, EMEA VP
at Coraid, said: "The M&E
industry is one of those where storage systems are really put through their
paces: users here need high performance, an easy way to add capacity, and
affordable price tags to handle the massive amounts of storage required to cope
with huge file sizes. In 365 we have found another customer who has realised
that Coraid is a better solution than any public cloud, especially if you have
to factor in networking and data transfer costs."