According to Jaroslav Sladek, video department chief for Czech Television, seamless data access is strategic to maximising production value while minimising 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.”
As Czech TV’s centralised, 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 finalising 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.
