Accelerate: Media Broadcast

Technology Category

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services

Applicable Industries

Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing

Use Cases

Predictive Maintenance
Process Control & Optimization

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

The Challenge

WRN Broadcast, an international broadcast managed services company, was experiencing a 30% year-on-year growth. However, their underpowered storage was running slower than many of the systems accessing it, which was hurting productivity. They needed to replace their existing storage solution with a more flexible, scalable, and secure infrastructure. The company had grown 30% year-on-year, over the last two years alone, and it more than doubled the number of television channels that it serves. In order to facilitate such rapid growth, and also plan for future expansion, WRN Broadcast needed to replace its existing storage solution with something more flexible, scalable, and absolutely secure, with an important additional criterion of being a leader in its field to match WRN Broadcast’s own standards of excellence.

About The Customer

Founded in 1992, WRN Broadcast is a leading international broadcast managed services company that offers a range of broadcast services to its global client base. These services include SD and HD playout, content management, satellite and fibre distribution, VoD, OTT, IPTV and mobile solutions, data centre services, channel management and a London-based Media Village which includes studio and media office space. Its clients include Top Up TV™, MTV® Arabia, Africa’s second largest Pay TV platform Zuku™, and MBC™. The company has been experiencing a 30% year-on-year growth and has more than doubled the number of television channels that it serves.

The Solution

WRN Broadcast purchased 100TB of high-performance storage from DDN. The installation process was very smooth, with no disruption to the day-to-day running of WRN Broadcast, and the system fitted seamlessly into the company’s existing workflow with hardly any reconfiguration or new procedures required. Data was migrated to the new system over the course of a week while systems were reconfigured in the background. The DDN solution sits in the centre of WRN Broadcast’s operations, impacting data at every stage from ingest to transmission, so reliability is imperative. DDN’s easy integration process with third party solutions is key to the success of the workflow. The company works with solutions from Grass Valley™, Aspera™, Pharos™, Telestream™ and Evertz™, and thanks to the NAS architecture, DDN can talk to them all.

Operational Impact

Seamlessly scalable solution was implemented with zero downtime or disruption to day-to-day activities
By consolidating islands of storage into one powerful device, WRN streamlined their workflow, increase performance levels by 25%
Broadcasters can now produce 4X the amount of work processed in a 24 hour period

Quantitative Benefit