nachtblau GmbH Selecting Two 120TB Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000

Dot Hill Systems Corp. announced that Hamburg based post-production and media studio nachtblau GmbH has selected its AssuredSAN4000 series networked RAID arrays to provide the storage infrastructure supporting the ingest and delivery of news broadcasts for RTL Nord GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of RTL Television, who operate 56 TV channels and 27 radio stations across Europe.

The move to Dot Hill storage systems provides far greater reliability andperformance to support the transition from 30Mbps MPEG IMX to the current standard 50Mbps XDCAM HD422.

Founded in 2005, nachtblau offers media and IT services for television companies, producers, advertising, and event/PR agencies. Notable clients include RTL Nord, CBC, Associated Press, n-tv, UFA Sports and Financial Times among many others.

“After evaluating several alternatives we selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000 series for our storage infrastructure refresh based on throughput performance, local service and support but also because the systems are designed for reliability from the ground up,” said Djawed Sadat, GM, nachtblau. “As broadcast resolutions increase the storage infrastructure must be able to deliver both in terms of play-out and the post-production workflow, but solid reliability is equally important.“

nachtblau are using two Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000 Series configurations each with an initial 120TB which are mirrored to provide CDP with a HA SAN appliance running over an 8Gb FC network. The systems support both news feed ingest, 14+ Abode Premiere based editing workstations and nachtblau’s in-house media asset management solution (medialoopster). This infrastructure supports the news broadcast services for RTL Nord.

Dot Hill storage solutions are designed to handle the high bandwidth performance demands of high-quality, high-frame per second transfers, faster and more predictably than anybody else, resulting in time and money savings in the video production process and ensuring a video viewing experience in all content delivery applications. Media and entertainment applications can also benefit from 16Gb FC SAN connectivity through a simple low cost upgrade path which can benefit productivity in many ways, including improved workflows and faster access to media archives.

“We are delighted that nachtblau have selected the Dot Hill AssuredSAN 4000 series for their RTL Nord news broadcast delivery platform,” said Joe Swanson, VP marketing and business development, DotHill. “Dot Hill storage and the high performance AssuredSAN 4000 series in particular have had great success in the media and entertainment sector underpinned by solid reliability and best in class cost/performance.“