MLB Network Ramps Up Archive Access Speed With DDN MEDIAScaler

MLB Network has deployed DataDirect Networks’ (DDN) MEDIAScaler GS7K storage solution to accelerate and simplify its archive footage storage and access. MLB Network captures and catalogues multi-petabytes of digital information each year and manages an active archive repository of more than 40 petabytes of data storage. With the adoption of DDN’s MEDIAScaler, MLB Network has simplified the management of its live and archived video assets, sped up content access times, and powered its ability to provide high definition content wherever it is needed within the post production environment.

“The ability to quickly access archived footage is critical to a high performance post production environment,” says Tab Butler, senior director of post-production and media management at MLB Network. “Being able to quickly produce content with historical footage combined with partial file restored clips from games is essential to supporting our business operations. With DDN’s MEDIAScaler, we’ve been able to simplify our disk storage management, while increasing our network attached storage within our archive system. The four 40 Gigabit ports on each GS7K controller enables faster access to content, while allowing more content to stream from more tape drives simultaneously, allowing us to scale to meet our growing needs.”

For the past several years, MLB Network, in a collaboration among MLB entities, has built an asset management system, referred to as the DIAMOND System, which manages a 40 petabyte tape-based archive system. The DIAMOND System captures and catalogs more than 500 hours of live video content per day, and preserves all MLB Network original programing as well as the vast digitized video library spanning more than 100 years of baseball. With the need for higher performance and larger scale, MLB Network was looking for a disk storage appliance to effectively accelerate and streamline their DIAMOND asset management system. MLB Network selected DDN MEDIAScaler storage, combined with an archive middleware, to create an efficient way to manage and easily access the digital content housed in the archive.

MEDIAScaler is a high-performance, file-based storage solution for today’s large-scale rich media workflows. MEDIAScaler provides concurrent access to content across global users while accelerating transcode, reducing hardware footprint and seamlessly integrating with the Cloud. It provides end-to-end digital content management and data protection in a single solution for large-scale environments of up to hundreds of petabytes and millions of IOPS, and enables media organizations such as MLB Network to easily cache numerous files on a high-performance platform.

“MEDIAScaler is delivering lowered maintenance costs, accelerated access times to content while simplifying management of the archive disk storage for MLB Network’s creative teams,” added Butler.