Accelerate: Media & Entertainment

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Functions

Discrete Manufacturing
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Computer Vision
Digital Twin

Services

Data Science Services
System Integration

The Challenge

MLB Network, a 24/7 TV network for baseball fans, was facing challenges in managing its vast baseball video archive. The network required a high-performance disk cache to support tape migration for the archive while accommodating 7,000 hours of new content ingested weekly. They also needed to simplify complex, concurrent workflows to ensure seamless support for up to 40 post-production jobs concurrently. The network was also looking for a technology that could suit the needs of two sports TV networks. The immediate challenge was moving LTO-4 content into a disk cache and then rewriting that content onto T10KD tapes, while simultaneously recording and archiving new footage onto the T10KD platform.

About The Customer

MLB Network is Major League Baseball’s 24/7 TV network. It is the ultimate television destination for baseball fans, featuring the Emmy-winning “MLB Tonight,” live regular season and postseason telecasts, game highlights, and original programming, as well as insights and analysis from highly regarded commentators. When MLB Network first launched in a record-setting 50 million homes on January 1, 2009, it was heralded as the largest network debut in cable TV history. Since then, the network has steadily expanded its programming while earning awards and accolades for its unparalleled game and studio coverage. In 2015, the National Hockey League entered into a media rights partnership with MLB Advanced Media, and NHL Network’s operations were shifted to the same facilities as MLB Network in Secaucus, New Jersey.

The Solution

MLB Network chose DDN’s MEDIAScaler Converged Media Storage as their solution. The MEDIAScaler storage solution includes the MEDIAScaler parallel file system. The solution delivered high performance and massive scalability in an all-in-one parallel file storage appliance. DDN’s industry-leading density was also a major plus as MLB Network faced serious space constraints in its data center. MEDIAScaler offers concurrent access to content while accelerating end-to-end digital content management in a single solution that can scale seamlessly up to hundreds of petabytes and millions of IOPS. The four 40-gigabit ethernet ports on each controller of the MEDIAScaler provided the flexibility to deploy storage in several configurations, ensuring faster access to content, while allowing more footage to stream from more tape drives simultaneously.

Operational Impact

All-in-one, high-performance storage appliance enables faster access to content while allowing more footage to stream from more tape drives simultaneously.
Multiple users work on concurrent workflows simultaneously without performance bottlenecks.
Streamlined storage management enables keeping pace with ever-increasing post-production demands.

Quantitative Benefit

The network writes more than 50TB of new content to the archive each day.
The network can move twice the amount of jobs without any backlog.
The network can move content from tape to the disk cache at speeds of up to 1.8Gb/s.