MTV Oy, the leading commercial television company and production house in Finland, recently relocated to a new center in the suburbs of Helsinki, seizing the opportunity for a major technical refresh. The facility serves multiple channels and streaming services, and a key part of the project was to migrate its extensive news and sport archive from tape, a task accomplished with EditShare providing the latest storage technology.Central storage for all live production is provided by four nodes of EditShare EFS 60NL nearline storage, with a total capacity at present of six petabytes. The EditShare storage is directly accessed by journalists and producers via their workstations, which are connected to production servers and asset management provided by EVS. The open architecture of EditShare EFS storage makes the integration seamless and transparent.“It was important that journalists don’t have to care where the material is,” said Tommi Tynys, Head of Broadcasting Technology at MTV Oy. “Whereas getting content from the tape archive could take 30 minutes or more, now users search directly for what they need and it is instantly available to them. We need to take the fight to our competitors, to be first with the news, so performance is vital to us.”The facilities at the new center are managed for MTV by NEP Finland, and the companies collaborated on designing the new architecture. The complete center was built by Broadcast Solutions Nordic, with Pipeline Media providing continuing support for the systems.“One of the great things about EditShare is that the storage network is completely scalable,” said Jukka Keski-Loppi of Pipeline Media. “Our estimate is that the MTV archive will grow by 350 TB a year, and we can add storage as we need it without taking the system offline.”MTV’s Tynys added that the system was also extremely reliable and resilient. “It took a while to transfer all our archive into EditShare,” he said. “But now it is running we have had zero downtime, even with a lot of users demanding simultaneous access.”Stephen Tallamy, CTO at EditShare added “In demanding environments like MTV, nearline means virtually instant. We designed the EFS 60NL as an ultra-high density storage node for media that needs to be accessible, but does not need the performance of an online production workflow.“That transforms the architecture of the news and sport facility: the complete archive can be online thanks to the very high storage density of our solution, and at the same time it’s available to all users, when they need it.”The EditShare EFS 60NL is built for high performance media applications. It uses native erasure coding, eliminating the need for hardware-based RAID while providing complete resilience. The standard chassis holds 60 enterprise-grade disk drives, all hot swappable from the front of the rack.
