White Paper: Chesapeake Systems Taps Imation Nexsan Solutions for Philadelphia Eagles, Half Yard Productions
Story Highlights
Imation and its Nexsan solutions have emerged as Chesapeake Systems’ go-to resource for several of its clients, including the Philadelphia Eagles and Half Yard Productions. Below is a white paper authored by the Imation team detailing Chesapeake’s efforts.
SUMMARY
Chesapeake Systems is a value-added reseller and IT services provider specializing in workflow solutions for media and entertainment (M&E) environments. Over the company’s 10+ years working with M&E clients, they’ve included solutions from various data storage vendors in the systems they’ve built for their clients. But in the last couple of years, Imation and its Nexsan solutions have emerged as Chesapeake’s go-to resource and have delivered tremendous value for Chesapeake’s clients, including the Philadelphia Eagles and Half Yard Productions.
“To us, Imation’s Nexsan solutions mean predictability,” says Nick Gold, Chief Revenue Officer, Chesapeake Systems. “They are ultra-reliable, they deliver tons of added value and you know exactly what you’re going to get when you buy them.”
ABOUT CHESAPEAKE SYSTEMS
Chesapeake Systems’ Mark Dent (left) and Nick Gold
With a mission to provide “Creative IT for the Creative Professional,” Chesapeake Systems specializes in developing solutions for the most demanding digital workflow challenges. The company’s clients range from international broadcasters to small businesses, and it has particular expertise working with organizations in the M&E industry. Chesapeake is a value-added reseller of various technology and data storage products and also offers maintenance and support services. The company is based in Baltimore, Maryland.
“We’ve had a lot of partners over our 24 years in business, but I can’t think of a better one than Imation,” says Chesapeake Systems CEO Mark Dent. “They are definitely our go-to vendor for storage.”
THE IT INFRASTRUCTURE CHALLENGE
Chesapeake’s clients require storage that can enable their demanding workflow requirements. Especially in the M&E industry, organizations are trying to keep up with an explosion in the amount of data they create; not only must they be able to work with the data efficiently in order to operate and be profitable, they must be able to store and protect that data over time.
Chesapeake’s clients generally need the following characteristics from their storage:
• Density. Many of Chesapeake’s clients do not have typical data center environments, so they must set aside existing office space for their IT solutions. As a result, density is a huge consideration, especially at sites in space-constrained and expensive real estate markets like New York City; organizations need to deploy data storage solutions that pack maximum value into a minimal footprint.
• Value. Clients are looking for the right balance of the most storage performance they can get for the best $/TB figure that they can find.
• Reliability. Downtime directly equates to lost revenue for Chesapeake’s clients, so storage solutions must maximize uptime and minimize or eliminate threats.
• Scalability.TechnologicaladvanceslikeUltraHDand enhancements in camera acquisition have exponentially increased the amount of data that M&E organizations must store. Chesapeake’s clients require storage solutions that can not only handle current storage demands but also scale seamlessly to accommodate the requirements of the future.
THE IMATION SOLUTION
In the last couple of years Chesapeake has come to rely almost exclusively on Imation and its Nexsan solutions, using them as the data storage components of the comprehensive IT solutions it builds for its clients. In particular, Chesapeake mostly uses Nexsan E-Series RAID systems from Imation because of their superb ability to support M&E operational needs such as video production, editing, animation, graphics and more. In addition, E-Series solutions deliver tremendous density, performance, price per terabyte and backup and archive capabilities.
RESULTS AND BENEFITS
Imation’s Nexsan solutions have delivered for Chesapeake and its clients, including:
• Chesapeake has found that Imation’s Nexsan storage is at least twice as dense as standard solutions from other storage vendors. As a result, it has been an ideal fit for clients, especially those with unconventional data centers and high-priced real estate. The corresponding savings in power, cooling and other operational expenses have been significant as well.
• The price per terabyte of Imation’s storage is “extraordinarily good,” leading to better overall value, lower total cost of ownership and higher ROI.
• Users have received predictable and steady up time. And in the rare cases when Imation’s support team has been called, they have delivered quickly and efficiently.
• Clients have also deployed Imation’s storage for backup, archive and disaster recovery purposes, keeping complete system replicas, redundancies and duplications on Nexsan E-Series systems.
• As clients have needed to scale up their storage environments, Chesapeake has deployed Imation’s Nexsan E-Series expansion chassis in environments where E-Series solutions are already in place. The additional storage has done the job very well, adding capacity and performance in linear fashion while minimizing additional hardware and operational costs.
PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
One Chesapeake customer with Imation storage as part of its overall IT environment is the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles. The Eagles are known as one of the league’s most marketing-savvy teams, producing a lot of video content and disseminating it across many channels to keep fans engaged and informed at all times. Accordingly, the Eagles needed a storage solution that could enable the operations it desired and could scale to accommodate data growth and new video production technologies. Since deploying in the summer of 2014, the Nexsan E-Series system has stood up perfectly in terms of performance and reliability, enabling the Eagles to produce more fan-friendly video offerings, like in-game video packages, than ever before. In addition, the Eagles were able to achieve all of this with an overall solution from Chesapeake that was significantly less expensive than other options the Eagles evaluated.
HALF YARD PRODUCTIONS
Chesapeake also has deployed Imation’s Nexsan storage as part of an overall IT-centric media solution for Half Yard Productions, which produces television shows such as “Say Yes to the Dress” and “Diggers” for networks including TLC, National Geographic, and The Travel Channel. Imation’s Nexsan E-Series storage solutions have become an integral part of Half Yard’s full post- production IT environment. Half Yard’s business has grown tremendously and several storage expansions have been required to keep pace with surging data storage and video production demands. In such situations, Imation’s Nexsan solutions have been seamlessly deployed into the existing environment. The density of Nexsan storage enables Half Yard to scale up in the most cost-efficient manner possible, and house their entire storage infrastructure in the existing space Half Yard has available.
As Chesapeake Systems continues to grow, it will be looking to expand its footprint into the health care sector and more. As it does so, it will continue to include Imation’s data storage solutions as essential components in the IT solutions it builds and deploys for its clients.
