Canal 13 integrated its active production and archiving workflows on Quantum to accelerate production and protect content, supporting real-time collaboration and simpler operations.
Canal 13 is a major broadcaster in Chile that produces news, sports and entertainment programming. Coming under pressure to produce more content within shorter timeframes, and at the same time support new media formats, Canal 13 needed to consolidate fragmented storage environments. Simpler management and controlling costs were further goals.
Working with Zer Digital system integrators, the solution Canal 13 adopted involved building a scalable, resilient content lake. It uses an integrated workflow between Quantum Myriad all-flash NAS as their high-performance production storage, and Quantum ActiveScale object storage, including ActiveScale Cold Storage for longer term retention. Content lakes are centralised storage repositories that store content from diverse sources and in various formats, and include tools to retrieve, manage, analyse and use the content.
“We needed a system that could meet both our real-time production demands and long-term archive needs, and still be manageable and cost-effective over time,” said Rodrigo Lara, engineering manager for Canal 13. “With Quantum’s Myriad and ActiveScale, and the support of Zer Digital, we now have a complete platform that gives us better performance and simplifies operations. Equally important, it protects our content for the future.”
Software-defined NAS with All-Flash Architecture
At the production end, the Myriad software-defined NAS is built with all-flash architecture as storage for high-speed content ingest, editing and collaboration. At Canal 13, Myriad consolidates multiple previously isolated storage systems into a single platform, retaining the agility to support all of their editorial workflows.
Myriad is a containerized, scale-out file system application based on non-proprietary NVMe SSD drives and supporting SMB and NFS protocols. Myriad uses a custom key-value store as its storage engine – data is stored paired to key values and optimized for reading and writing that data. The storage engine can then retrieve data with its associated value, by a unique key, and is responsible for organizing, deduplicating, compressing, erasure coding and writing data to the physical NVMe devices.
Myriad environments are dynamic. Multiple file system types are allowed to coexist, with on-the-fly file system creation and automatic scaling. Each file system uses flags to indicate to the key-value store whether objects should be deduplicated, compressed or both.
Users add storage nodes as they are needed and can bring them online rapidly with dynamic support for data protection and data levelling. With immediately usable capacity and the option to expand storage as requirements evolve, users can maintain high performance and reliability for data sharing. Myriad enables Canal 13’s production teams to quickly adapt to new projects and changing demands without IT bottlenecks or downtime.
Resilient Long-Term Archiving
To work alongside Myriad’s high-performance production storage, Canal 13 deployed ActiveScale object storage as the basis of its content lake strategy. ActiveScale operates as scalable, cost-predictable storage for less frequently accessed content, preserving archived data but making sure it can be retrieved at any time for future productions or re-broadcasting.
It optimises storage across multiple classes – flash, disk, tape – in a single namespace, and allows users to expand higher cost, high-performance disk and the more affordable tape tiers independently, in order to balance performance and cost.
Adding ActiveScale Cold Storage to this system means Canal 13 can store vast amounts of infrequently used media at a much lower cost than cloud services without incurring egress or API fees. ActiveScale’s use of multiple sites for resilience is especially critical given Chile’s earthquake-prone terrain, as data can still be protected despite local disasters.
Single Platform
Working through a single, straightforward platform that supports diverse workflows from production to archiving, is one of the main advantages Canal 13 sees in their new system, which they have been able to adopt without also upgrading their IT skills. Over time, it will also help them adapt to new formats, larger projects and demands from evolving workflows.
Speed has been an important factor. Myriad’s flash-based performance and dedicated architecture are built for faster ingest, editing and project delivery.
Canal 13 acquired this system on the Quantum GO subscription model, enabling them to deploy storage-as-a-service with an OpEx-based payment structure. This approach aligns the company’s technology investment with their operational budgets and gives immediate access to high-performance infrastructure, without delays, and meanwhile ActiveScale Cold Storage serves as a long-term archive that is not subject to unpredictable cloud fees.
“Canal 13’s new Quantum-based infrastructure represents a model for broadcast operations into the near future,” said Brian Cabrera, chief administrative officer for Quantum. “They now have a flexible, high-performance platform equipped for faster content creation, stronger content protection and scalability.” www.quantum.com
