StorNext Smooths Digital Transition For Polish Broadcaster

Quantum StorNext Helps Leading Broadcaster Go All-Digital

When nc+ decided to transition to an all-digital infrastructure, Poland’s premier pay-TV provider selected StorNext® to free up its production teams to focus on delivering quality content, not moving videotapes. The result: Savings in space, time, and money.  

Slow Manual Workflow

Specializing in broadcasting material ranging from international films to live sporting events, nc+ is the leading premium television provider in Poland. The company recently decided to move to an all-digital, file-based system, taking advantage of broadcast technology advancements to transform its workflow, playout, and archive processes. The previous infrastructure at nc+ was based on working with videotape. The manual system was slow for producing new material, and re-using existing content was a complex, time-consuming process. For every job, tapes had to be retrieved; editing to update content was all linear; and the manual ingest-to-playout process all had to be repeated.

Major goals of the new system were to streamline the workflow for new and existing content, to reduce time for editing and post-production, to automate the transcoding process, and to make it easier and faster to support new, emerging platforms. For its upgrade, nc+ worked closely with SAD, a leading video system integrator, and developed a heterogeneous infrastructure. Therefore, it became critical to have an open systems-capable storage system that integrates access to content effectively across all the heterogeneous applications. After looking at all the alternatives, nc+ and SAD selected Quantum’s StorNext File System and StorNext AEL6000 Archives.

Benefits: Tiered Storage, Fast Access

In the new nc+ system, the StorNext File System controls 200TB of nearline disk archive, which is used to ingest all the file-based content, to hold low-resolution proxies, and to make content available to a dozen production, quality control, transcoder, and playout servers over a high-speed Fibre Channel link.In addition, nc+ uses StorNext Storage Manager (SNSM) software, which provides a tiered storage system with one common storage pool that combines the capacity of the nearline disk with digital LTO tapes in two StorNext AEL6000 Archives.

In the archive, recent assets are all on disk, but SNSM moves older content to tape for longer-term storage, automatically making two copies of each asset for redundancy. Proxies for all the content remain on disk to make access fast. “StorNext has turned a complex job— finding the right files, extracting the right content, and delivering it in the right format—into a fast, automated process,” says Mateusz Karolak, Presales Manager, SAD. “We’ve calculated an overall production performance increase of 30 percent.”

The result has been a storage solution that is a powerful asset both now and in the future.“Not only does StorNext deliver the performance and reliability required, but it is also very scalable,” says Jaroslaw Kordalewski, Executive Director for TV Technology and IT Systems at nc+. “It is allowing us to efficiently and cost-effectively manage over 1.5 petabytes of digital assets today and will easily handle our expected growth of an additional petabyte over the next 12 months.”