Scality RING Provides Video Distribution Storage at RTL2, a German Television Channel
With its active video archive growing 200 terabytes per year, German TV station RTL II needed a more efficient way to scale. By deploying HPE ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Servers with Scality RING object storage software, the station gained petabyte-level scalability while accelerating video transfer speeds tenfold.
“I would recommend Scality because the system is very stable and the experience we have with the support is that it’s very quick, friendly, and absolutely qualified.”
“The performance of the RING and the different access nodes allows us to have more streams than before. That is quite important because, especially for the online things, there are many people who want to access the storage parallel to get material out of it, to edit it, and to bring it then online.”
Hans-Josef Lauer,
IT Operations Manager at RTL II
Hans-Josef Lauer in the RTL II datacenter
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Availability &
ReliabilityWith more than 100M views per month, the RTL VOD service requires high read performance and efficient handling of very large files.
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Data Resilience & Disaster Recovery
Viewers have very low tolerance for downtime, and in a highly competitive market, near perfect accessibility to VOD services needs to be assured.
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Lower Operations Overhead
Use of Scality RING, in combination with chosen hardware vendors, proved to be exceptionally cost-efficient compared to earlier SAN system.
Scality Customer Case Study
RTL II, is a major production and broadcast center, creating 200 terabytes of new material (movies and TV shows) every year.
RTL II deployed 18 ProLiant SL4540 Gen8 Servers with Scality RING running in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating environment.
This powerful platform will now allow RTL II to scale its video archive beyond 3.5 petabytes in a footprint 50% smaller than SGI.
The solution is also replicated in three data centers connected by a 10-gigabit network to ensure continuous availability in the event of a problem in one of the sites.
Reality never stops at RTL II
There is no pause button and little time for a short break. Programming needs to be current. Changes foreshadowed in the last hour in social media need to be reflected in the broadcast. Those are the expectations of todays TV viewers.
A key player in Europe’s Reality-TV and Docu-Soap market, the German TV station is stepping up to that challenge. With in-house production and high-quality content licensing, it generates hundreds of Terabytes of movie and TV programming per year. Editing and curating that content to deliver to its audience over broadcast and streaming access channels in near-real time is the goal of RTL II.
To this end the company knew it would need to modify its content storage infrastructure. As VP of IT & Services, Reinhard Görtner realized that it was not fast enough, nor could it scale to reach this target. With the existing system, editors faced a constant uphill battle to finalize their broadcast. Upload times were slow, restricting editing work to no later than six hours before the scheduled broadcast time. Any last-minute change to information just could not make it. Because the system did not scale well, archived content was not easily accessible, further complicating editing work.
“We view Scality as technology for the future. Their RING storage is exactly what we need for our petabytescale business. The question was then, which hardware platform should we choose? After looking at SGI and EMC, we found the HPE ProLiant SL4540 Server was the perfect fit for Scality and our existing HPE server infrastructure.”
Reinhard Görtner / Vice President IT and Services, RTL II
Why Scality was chosen
The new system had to be fast and furious. Upload speeds had to increase by orders of magnitude and it had to scale easily to nearly any size. In addition, it needed to be completely reliable. Without costing the bank, naturally.
Reinhard and his team managed to deliver on all requirements. With the Scality RING deployed, content growth was no longer a problem. Editing was possible in near-real time, with upload times reduced by a factor of 10 – broadcast quality movies required less then 7 minutes. RTL II’s multi-Petabyte content archive was not only accessible in full for the editors, access speed were getting faster as more content was uploaded.
Deployed in a geographically diverse structure, the RING also virtually guaranteed that the TV station would never miss a broadcast.
RTL II is now ready for even more reality. Programming is always current and editors can actually find time for a break.
“Our ultimate goal is having one storage platform for everything. That’s what Scality and the ProLiant SL4540 offer. They bring efficiency, performance, and virtually limitless scalability.”
— Reinhard Görtner,
Vice President IT and Services, RTL II