Maine Public Broadcasting Supports High-Performance Video Editing and Cost-Effective Archiving with Data Progression
Overview
The Maine Public Broadcasting Network (MPBN) serves Maine and also reaches most of New Brunswick, Canada, and parts of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Through its radio, television, educational and Web services, the Maine Public Broadcasting Network provides ideas, information and lifelong learning to a diverse public.
Situation
In the course of producing a number of TV shows, including the award-winning Quest series, MPBN’s video editors require a substantial amount of storage computing power. Utilizing proprietary video editing systems with direct attached storage proved to be an expensive and inefficient solution.
Solution
MPBN chose Compellent Storage Center SAN to provide an affordable, high-performance solution for its video editing environment and business systems servers. The complete hardware and software solution provided by Compellent consists of 34 TB of data and advanced software features including Data Progression for Automated Tiered Storage and Remote Instant Replay for long distance replication.
MPBN's Automated Tiered Storage Solution: With Data Progression, MPBN is able to keep high-performance Fibre Channel disk available for video editing and business systems and maintain an online archive of video footage on lower-cost SATA drives.
Reduced Editing Time by 40 Percent
In MPBN’s new open systems computing environment, all the editing equipment is the same. With the Storage Center SAN, MPBN can connect all the volumes to all the editing workstations simultaneously. Editors can work on any workstation, beginning and ending on different machines without any problems. Multiple editors can contribute to the same program at the same time and editors can edit more than one show at a time.
"With Data Progression, we have been able to dramatically increase productivity, cutting our video production time by 40 percent," said Pazerra. In fact, editors are so excited they now want to edit three shows at once and extending the volumes in the Storage Center SAN is a painless operation taking less than 10 seconds.
High-Performance Editing and Cost-Effective Online Archiving Within the Same System
Using Storage Center’s Data Progression, MPBN created three tiers of storage. Tier 1 provides high-performance Fibre Channel storage for MPBN’s business systems, including a SQL database and file and print servers. Tier 2 provides high-performance Fibre Channel disks exclusively for video editing and Tier 3 is comprised of SATA disks for archive volumes and other inactive server volumes.
With the easy-to-use interface, MPBN administrators set up an aggressive three to one bi-directional migration schedule between the video editing on Tier 2 and the video archive on Tier 3. If blocks on Tier 2 haven't been used for three days, they are automatically migrated to the lower-cost SATA drives. This rapid progression ensures inactive blocks do not take up valuable Fibre Channel space needed for performance-intensive video editing. If, however, blocks stored in the archive become active, they are migrated back to the high-performance drives on the next cycle, ensuring high speed access for all active data.
Using the lower-cost Tier 3 capacity, MPBN created two archives—one for shows in progress, ready to be replicated to another location for editing, and a second archive to store a stock footage library. Now, if an editor needs stock footage of a particular scene or animal, they can search online instead of spending hours wading through physical tapes or having to re-shoot.
Cut Time From Editing to On Air by 50 Percent
Before implementing Remote Instant Replay, MPBN staffers would get in the car and drive a completed video 110 miles from Lewiston to the transition facility in Bangor where the video is prepared for broadcast. Once in Bangor, they would preview the video, and if something needed to be corrected or edited at the last minute, they would have to drive back to Lewiston, fix the problem and then drive back to Bangor with the updated tape.
Remote Instant Replay allows MPBN to easily replicate data between sites, cutting the time it takes to go from editing to on air by 50 percent. Now editors simply put completed projects in a folder to be replicated and no one needs to drive the video from Lewiston to Bangor. If something needs to be corrected, it can be done and then re-replicated to transition facility without a 220 mile diversion.