Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/40055
MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT For Beam, two systems are better than one for delivering — and storing — multimedia content THE SOLUTION Beam's solution was to purchase a BlueArc Mercury 50 network storage solution earlier this year for its backup and secondary storage requirements. The Mercury 50 has about 52 terabytes of SATA storage. "The main reason we've been using BlueArc is reliability,"Smallwood says. "There's a SUMMARY Delivering high-end multimedia commercial content around the world is a chal- lenging proposition: ensuring it is in the correct language, delivered with no latency and is easily accessed is another! As one of the world's leading global distributors of digital media for commercial advertising, Beam plays, changes, sends and stores con- tent worldwide, with one of the largest global online archives of commercial advertis- ing material. Beam needed a high-performance, reliable and scalable storage solution and partnered with BlueArc several years ago. When Beam needed to upgrade its backup storage and archive storage this year, it turned again to BlueArc for a solution. THE COMPANY Beam is a service-driven technology business that has transformed the way brands adapt, manage and distribute video content for the global digital age. Their systems simplify the process of managing, distributing and storing commercial content for an increasingly connected global marketplace. Beam was established as a project management tool for sister company, The Mill, and has evolved to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse array of media outlets. Today they store, adapt and send thousands of assets to hundreds of television broad- casters worldwide; manage a secure archive in excess of 1,000,000 assets; and are digi- tally connected to every major online site. They work with many of the world's largest brands and agencies to manage every aspect of their commercial content. THE CHALLENGE Beam requires a high-performance, high-availability, highly reliable storage infra- structure, and from the beginning they worked with BlueArc for its primary storage needs. Beam has been using a BlueArc network storage solution supporting 75 ter- abytes of storage for its primary production needs. Stephen Smallwood, Systems Ad- ministrator with visual effects studio The Mill, explains: "Prior to using BlueArc, our sec- ondary storage looked quite different in terms of how the computers were seeing it." large amount of digital media stored within Beam in its online archiving system for commercial advertising content — it's on there forever once it's been uploaded". "The database systems are identical across the two sites, failing over is now much simpler and we have confidence that our secondary site will perform as well as our pri- mary site. We want to be able to run either site at full speed with reliability in the stor- age and we know we can depend on BlueArc to deliver this." The other major advantage of scaling up with the BlueArc Mercury for secondary stor- age is that it enables Beam to store and access archived data on high-performance, highly available disk storage. "We wanted to store it on a disk because it has to be instantly acces- sible at any time. Advertisers expect it to be available as and when they need it." THE RESULTS "The BlueArc Mercury was installed earlier this year and the process was seamless, alongside simplifying our system. We are very pleased with how the system has been working," says Smallwood. "Having the Mercury with the Titan enables us to work with our ideal configuration, with the two sites being interchangeable." THE CONCLUSION Beam is not only a loyal and satisfied customer, so is its sister company, The Mill, which uses BlueArc network storage for high-performance applications such as 3D modeling, visual effects and rendering. "The performance of that system was very in- fluential in us continuing down the path of using BlueArc."As Beam looks to the future it will probably take advantage of some of the more advanced tools offered by BlueArc, such as intelligent tiering and mirroring. Beam delivers more than 20,000 TV commercials every year, has more than 80,000 registered users, with more than 500,000 advertising stored assets. "The database systems are identical across the two sites, failing over is now much simpler and we have confidence that our secondary site will perform as well as our primary site. We want to be able to run either site at full speed with reliability in the storage and we know we can depend on BlueArc to deliver this." Stephen Smallwood, Systems Administrator, Beam for more customer stories, visit www.bluearc.com BlueArc Corporation Corporate Headquarters 50 Rio Robles, San Jose, CA 95134 t 408 576 6600 t 866-864-1040 www.bluearc.com BlueArc UK Ltd. European Headquarters Queensgate House Cookham Road, Bracknell RG12 1RB, United Kingdom t +44 (0) 1344 408 200 f +44 (0) 1344 408 202 ©2011 BlueArc Corporation. All rights reserved. The BlueArc logo is a registered trademark of BlueArc Corporation. 12/10 CS-IMEN-00 Come visit us in booth at IBC 2011 7.E10