Iceland opts for Ethernet storage

Coraid® Inc has been chosen by 365 Media, the largest mass media company in Iceland, to provide high-performance storage for its television and radio broadcast.

365 Media operates ten television channels, five radio stations, and Iceland’s largest newspaper. To supply content to its traditional broadcast and IP-based services, 365 Media adds over 35 hours of new video content into its archives every day. It therefore comes as no surprise that over the last few years the company has seen its storage requirements more than double and according to Arni Finnsson, technology manager at 365 Media, its storage archive will likely exceed a petabyte of digital content by 2014.

To cope with this growth in demand and changes in production formats such as the increased adoption of HD video, 365 Media wanted its storage platform to provide much higher performance and the ability to scale quickly and effortlessly. For the company it was a complex decision; initially it considered building a file archive using commodity hardware and its own in-house technical resource but it then decided against it. As Finnsson explained, “We discounted this idea fairly quickly as although it was feasible, we did not want to turn into a software and systems development house. We serve up content 24/7, so if there is any problem with the storage platform, we would need access to skilled technical support that can provide an immediate solution. Running it ourselves just wouldn’t have been practical. We also considered working with traditional broadcast-focused storage providers such as Ominion and EMC Isilon. However, we are growing rapidly and the cost per terabyte of both these solutions was higher than we could fit within our budget.”

After reviewing storage systems that had traditionally been considered enterprise grade, 365 Media selected the Coraid SP3000 server with SRX4200 storage arrays. As Finnsson added, “Coraid appealed to us because it offered a good balance between throughput, scalability and price that we could not find anywhere else. It also offers a user-friendly architecture that supports high availability and that would be easy for us to operate. Like most organisations in the M&E space we have a constant need for growing amounts of high-performance, scalable storage and, as Coraid uses standard Ethernet technology, it has also given us a clear upgrade path from 1Gb to 10Gb and eventually to 40Gb if we need it.”

Within six months, 365 Media had filled 80% of the initial 180TB capacity. Coraid provided a second SP3000 server and four additional SRX4200 storage arrays. The system was also upgraded from a 1GbE to a 10GbE connection using the same core chassis with a simple Ethernet card and driver upgrade. This in-line upgrade process has allowed for a smoother and more cost-effective transition for 365 Media and has led to no unplanned downtime in nine months.

Pete Godden, EMEA VP at Coraid said, “The M&E industry is one of those where storage systems are really put through their paces: users here need high performance, an easy way to add capacity, and affordable price tags to handle the massive amounts of storage required to cope with huge file sizes. In 365 we have found another customer who has realised that Coraid is a better solution than any public cloud, especially if you have to factor in networking and data transfer costs.”