metaSAN user story: FOX54 WZDX.TV

metaSAN not only appeared to perfectly meet WZDX - Fox 54 TV's  video-centric workflow needs but also gave a very appealing argument: it could help save the station money because it works with off-the-shelf storage and networking components.

With the Big Spring International Park and famous Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama, is best known for its nature, and technology. However, it should also be known for WZDX: North Alabama's first independent TV station that became a full-fledged affiliate of FOX in 1990.

Joe Kirby has been the station’s Assistant Chief Engineer for the past 6 years. His love for video - he studied video production in college - and a strong affinity with computers and electronics made him the perfect candidate for the job.

FOX 54 produces a lot of local advertising as well as channel promos. The production staff consists of three full time editors. A significant part of the team’s daily activities consist in creating promo packages that involve repurposing many assets.

Like the majority of regional stations, FOX 54 is on a constant budgetary diet. As such, Joe has developed a second nature when it comes time to acquire new equipment. He knows he needs to get the best bang for the buck. Their production setup is very functional: Content is shot in the DV25 format using a Canon XL-1. The Adobe Production Studio offers them integrated editing, compositing, and audio sweetening. Editors work at full quality thanks to the Matrox realtime hardware.

“Although we had a pretty good editing workflow, our editors were still spending a considerable amount of time locating tapes and/or transferring media from one edit bay to another” Joe explains, “Very often, the same elements had to be captured on all 3 bays so everyone could contribute to meet our tight production schedule.” There had to be a better way.

Just over two years ago, Joe embarked on a journey to implement a SAN within his facility because of the huge benefits he saw in a shared storage solution. After investigating a number of options and consulting with his systems integrator, Southern Digital Products, Joe finally settled his choice on metaSAN. Not only did it appear to perfectly meet his video-centric workflow needs but also gave him a very appealing argument: metaSAN could help save the station money because it works with off-the-shelf storage and networking components.

For shared storage, Joe picked the 1.5 TB Ciprico MediaVault 4210. This gave him the RAID protection he wanted, and the ability to hold well over 1,000 hours of DV video. In addition, the MediaVault easily delivers the performance required for multi-track realtime editing. The ATTO Celerity HBA was chosen for the three edit bays along with a Qlogic SANbox 5202 FC switch to tie everything together.

The SAN setup took place in January 2006. “metaSAN was really easy to install. If it wasn’t for the zoning of the switch, we would have been able to configure our whole SAN in a day! The fact that metaSAN builds on a file system we are familiar with, enabled us to test the fibre channel infrastructure prior to loading the software. This made us feel confident in our ability to support the solution. Once we resolved the switch configuration issue, our SAN took off like a rocket!”

“The impact that metaSAN had on our workflow was immediate and exceeded our expectations. Once a file has been ingested, it is now available to everyone. We no longer need to move stuff around, and this alone allows us to realize significant savings. In addition, since we have lots of disk space, we’ve taken the habit to keep projects on the SAN for a full year, as oppose to backing them up to DVD. Doing this allows us to easily go back to a client commercial for quick changes. We don’t need to spend time searching for the project, we just bring it up. In addition, we no longer lose material, something that was quite common when we were backing up to DVD.”

“This valuable time can now be allocated to other revenue-generating projects. There is therefore no doubt in my mind that metaSAN has saved us money. Another, less tangible, but key aspect of metaSAN is that it has also improved satisfaction among our editors: They now spend less time doing repetitive tasks, and more time using their creative talents.”

Joe has learned over the years that it is not a question of “if” but rather “when” a piece of equipment will go down. As such, he understands the importance of simplicity and appreciates the fact that metaSAN is far less complex and easier to support than alternative solutions. His ability to deal with issues has also limited downtime.

“One time we were faced with an unplanned downtime when a major power failure fried some of our equipment. After having replaced the defective Ethernet cards, our SAN volume would no longer be recognized. We got in touch with Tiger support and realized that even the OS would not recognize the volume. They offered us guidelines for avoiding this situation in the future. Thankfully, we didn’t lose any data. I was able to implement the changes and our SAN has since been very reliable. I also really like the LAN failover feature. It is nice to know that if one of our guys trip on the orange optical cable, we won’t lose connection to the SAN. This is the kind of attention to details that gives me confidence in the solution.”

“I’ve also been very impressed with Tiger’s support. With these guys being in located out of Europe, my initial thought was that they would not be able to assist us properly. It turns out that I’ve had far better response time from Tiger than I often get from manufactures located in the States. These guys understand and care for our industry, and their support staff knows their products inside and out.”

“Overall, I am giving metaSAN five stars. If I ever end up working in another facility that needs to implement a SAN, I will definitely recommend it. I’d also recommend it to anyone involved in video that needs a file-level sharing SAN.”