Czech TV Speeds Broadcast and Production Delivery with DDN's Fully Integrated MEDIAScaler Platform

Public Broadcaster and Post-Production Facility Addresses Modern Media Workflow Challenges, While Simplifying Concurrent Data-Intensive Editing and Film Restoration Workloads

News provided by

DataDirect Networks (DDN)

Jan 31, 2017, 07:27 ET

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 31, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- DataDirect Networks (DDN®) today announced that Czech Television, the public television broadcaster in the Czech Republic, has implemented DDN's MEDIAScaler® parallel file storage for better support of an explosion of digital video content and the demands of high-end production equipment, challenging 4K workflows and ultra-high-definition formats. In meeting its goal to deliver news, sports and entertainment broadcasting 24/7, including a wealth of original programming, Czech TV required the highest levels of storage performance and capacity.

The organization had to ensure uninterrupted workflows across video ingest, editing, transcoding, distribution and archiving. In addition, Czech TV needed to accommodate multiple teams of people concurrently working on the same large files who were performing necessary color corrections and also restoring many old films that were in bad condition. To eliminate potential performance bottlenecks and operational delays, the company upgraded its legacy DDN storage infrastructure with a state-of-the-art DDN MEDIAScaler, a fully integrated storage platform with one petabyte of capacity and more than 7GB/s single-stream performance to keep pace with the most data-intensive media workflows.

According to Jaroslav Sladek, video department chief for Czech Television, seamless data access is strategic to maximizing production value while minimizing time to delivery both now and in the future. "DDN's MEDIAScaler is an essential piece of our future global storage network," he says. "And the best part of all is that the platform does exactly what it's supposed to do. The best product is the one you forget about because it simply works—and that's DDN."

Tweet this: .@ddn_limitless #storage speeds broadcast and production delivery for @CzechTV- http://bit.ly/2jiwOFp

As Czech TV's centralized, shared storage solution, DDN's MEDIAScaler supports multiple workloads, including 2K scanning using a Bone Spirit scanner; 4K restoration via three Diamant restoration suites; 4K color correction with two Baselight 4, four-node clusters; both 4K and 2K color correction using Baselight 2; and 2K DVS Clipster® for finalizing production files. The robust storage enables more workload clients to be added as needed without delay while streamlining the process of adding more drives and storage capacity without disrupting operations.

With DDN, satisfying evolving requirements, such as 3D and 8K formats, is straightforward, as is accommodating a move to open networking. DDN's support of OpenFlow, the emerging industry protocol for enabling software-defined networking, gives Czech TV a fast, flexible path to the future. The trouble-free implementation was completed in less than two weeks with no disruption in critical operations. Moreover, various teams from both broadcast and post-production now work on massive files concurrently without any performance degradation.

"DDN's MEDIAScaler provided an all-in-one turnkey solution designed to overcome the scale, performance and cost hurdles associated with data-hungry media environments," says David Stein, CEO of Interlab, a France-based systems integrator with extensive experience in the film and broadcast industries. "This made it easy for Czech TV to grow capacity and performance with both scale-up and scale-out schemas."

As the leading broadcast storage solution on the market, DDN supports more than 600 media and entertainment installations, including some of the biggest in the industry. Media companies rely on DDN's deep industry experience and unmatched performance to future-proof their environments and stay ahead of their competition by having the optimal storage solution to accommodate current and next-generation broadcast and post-production capabilities.

Supporting Resources

Czech Television Case Study
More on the DDN MEDIAScaler
More on DDN's Media & Entertainment Solutions
More on DDN Customers

About DDN
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world's leading big data storage supplier to data-intensive, global organizations. For more than 18 years, DDN has designed, developed, deployed and optimized systems, software and storage solutions that enable enterprises, service providers, universities and government agencies to generate more value and to accelerate time to insight from their data and information, on premise and in the cloud. Organizations leverage the power of DDN storage technology and the deep technical expertise of its team to capture, store, process, analyze, collaborate and distribute data, information and content at the largest scale in the most efficient, reliable and cost-effective manner. DDN customers include many of the world's leading financial services firms and banks, healthcare and life science organizations, manufacturing and energy companies, government and research facilities, and web and cloud service providers. For more information, go to www.ddn.com or call 1-800-837-2298.

Media Contacts:
DDN
Michael King
Sr. Director of Marketing
Email: [email protected]
Work: 408-419-2892

IGNITE Consulting, on behalf of DDN
Linda Dellett, 303-439-9398
Kathleen Sullivan, 303-439-9365
[email protected]

SOURCE DataDirect Networks (DDN)