Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

CASE STUDY: TURNER BROADCASTING TURNS TO ADIC StorNext

At Turner Broadcasting System's new Network Operations Center, 19 separate broadcast networks, including, TBS Superstation, TNT, Cartoon Network, TCM, Boomerang, and Turner South, share access to digital content thanks to Fibre Channel SAN technology and ADIC's StorNext File System. The end result is streamlined data management and maximized storage resource utilization.

In this all-digital broadcast environment, each network stages its own content and plays it out from a pod, or group of similar master control operations, with mirrored media servers and local disk arrays that hold about 100 hours of programming. In the old configuration, each Broadcast Operations Center (BOC), the predecessor to the pod concept, was an isolated storage island, responsible for ingesting and managing all its own content. Since a high percentage of content is shared among networks, that meant that BOCs were duplicating efforts and storing many copies of the same files.

"As much as forty percent of the commercial and promotional content that the networks broadcast is shared," explained Clyde Smith, senior vice president of Broadcast Entertainment Technology for Turner Entertainment Networks. "When the old BOCs managed that content themselves, we weren't able to maximize personnel utilization or server time and disk space, creating a management challenge. This problem is solved in the new Network Operations Center. It creates a centralized storage system and media operations group that serves all of the broadcast networks, giving them access to a common set of more than 30,000 commercial and promotional files. With this solution only the media operations group ingests material, and they manage it over time in a high bandwidth, high availability, multi-tiered, shared storage environment.

"The idea is simple, but we needed very powerful technology to pull it off," Smith said. "NAS filers didn't have enough bandwidth or capacity, so we installed a large SAN with 22 TB of disk capacity and eleven UNIX servers to stream data to the pods. Key to making this architecture work is the right SAN file system. After evaluating all the options, we chose the StorNext SAN File System."

StorNext FS, part of the ADIC StorNext Management Suite, is a distributed file system that manages high performance shared access to files stored on disk resources over a switched fabric. What TBS needed for its central storage pool was a combination of transparent data access, high performance, and high availability. For access, StorNext FS lets each of the servers access all the data in the disk arrays directly and at wire speeds, creating a shared storage pool. It offers flexible, high performance streaming, even with the large file sizes (250 MB to many Gigabytes) characteristic of digital media applications. "StorNext File System was the best choice we found for handling our very challenging combination of providing simultaneous access to large files with high performance streaming," Smith said.

StorNext FS leverages the SAN for multiple network destinations by allowing multiple copies to be created and moved through the fabric at the same time from a single master file. It can also give bandwidth priority to specific jobs-important for time-critical tasks. "Because we often need to create many local copies from the central master, time and bandwidth management are critical to our success. StorNext File System's ability to create multiple simultaneous streams from a single file is critical to us."

When storage resources are centralized, high availability is also essential. Since the new architecture makes the same content available transparently to multiple hosts, it provides built-in protection against the failure of any host. "StorNext File System adds high availability features as well. It is fully journaled, allowing rapid rebuilds in case of a system fault, and it provides fast automated failover between primary and standby control servers," Smith added. "It also allows us to add new hosts without interrupting operations."

The selection of StorNext FS was also linked to its ability to provide the same high level of performance for multiple operating systems in heterogeneous SANs. "Today, our file streaming hosts are Solaris machines, but StorNext File System allows us to use a lower-cost Wintel cluster for the file system metadata. It also gives us the option of adding other platforms in the future while continuing to meet our overall performance and reliability requirements."

*IDC 2001 worldwide revenue and unit market share data for all automated systems using DLT, SDLT, LTO, 8mm or AIT drives.