Case Study: ITV.com Upgrades To Compact, Energy-Efficient Nexsan SATABeast Xi's For Mac Environments

The ITV.com online broadcasting site relies on a team of eight production editors which use the Apple Final Cut Studio 2 – Final Cut 6 editing platform to prepare programs for the site. Because of the growing amount of online video content, ITV.com found that it was rapidly stretching its existing 25TB storage infrastructure to the limits. To assure that the high-volume site was efficiently architected, ITV.com sought high-density storage systems that provided energy savings without impacting performance. With its new environment, ITV.com planned to grow its storage capacity to 100TB and increase performance without expanding its already small datacenter.

"Our challenge was to increase the capacity from 25TB to 100TB and consolidate storage for our various online platforms into a single storage solution," said Chris Wood, Technical Manager, ITV Future Technologies. "It was also important to push the boundaries of what was possible with the platform to minimize unnecessary infrastructure expansion."

Compounding ITV.com's challenge was the inefficiency of separate, disjointed storage solutions to accommodate all of the video packages and image assets in its production editing department amongst the multiple online businesses. Often different editors are required to access the same video package at the same time which could create multiple volumes that later needed to be reconciled. In fact, there was one production editor that was literally "mobile," running back and forth between editing sites to physically collect assets on a storage device and manually port them from one editing station to another. Facing inefficiencies such as this along with the impending need for more storage capacity, ITV began to look into new storage options.