The Associated Press Uses EMC's Isilon NAS For Its HD Video Management

The Associated Press Uses EMC's Isilon NAS For Its HD Video Management

The Associated Press (AP), one of the largest news-gathering institutions in the world, has to constantly keep up with the mountains of high-definition video data in produces everyday. In order to effectively store and manage all of it without any compromise to quality, the company has turned to EMC's Isilon  scale-out Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution. Although EMC Isilon was initially deployed specifically for AP’s video editing workflow, the news organization soon began using Isilon to archive content as well, realizing significant cost savings.

Before implementation, AP used a tape system that would fail 10-15% of the time, and was also slow and expensive to maintain. EMC's Isilon allowed the AP to aggregate all storage assets into one pool, assign users appropriate levels of service, and easily perform other storage management tasks. This led to a savings of up to 45% per terabyte of HD video content and six times faster video copy and transfer rates. The deployment of EMC's Isilon required no training for AP's IT staff and is expected to be scaled from from about 800 terabytes today to about 2.5 petabytes by mid-2013 and add capacity and boost performance as needed thanks to the Isilon's scale-out architecture and management software.

“As part of its multimillion-dollar upgrade, the AP is transforming its video business by switching its entire newsgathering, production and distribution systems to HD, forming the largest rollout of HD by any news agency globally. As part of a complete production environment transformation, we deployed EMC Isilon to take our video storage capabilities into the next generation. Now we don’t have to compromise capacity for performance – we can grow both at the same time. With EMC Isilon we’ve made content access much faster for our clients, and we’re gaining a competitive advantage over other content providers.” -Don Merrick, storage and backup services manager, Associated Press

Source: EMC