E! Entertainment Television

Challenge

For E! Entertainment Television's Digital Asset Management Initiative, the entertainment network required an easy to manage, open-systems SAN infrastructure that would allow them to build a flexible, scalable centralized storage pool.

Solution

Implement a storage network with a Silicon Storage Appliance to create a centralized, flexible storage pool for E! Entertainment Television's digital asset management needs.

Benefits

The easy to manage Silicon Storage Appliance allows E! Entertainment Television production professionals to have real-time access to digitized content, bringing productivity and workflow efficiencies, and accelerated return on assets (ROA). The S2A Silicon Storage Appliance provides easy, cost-effective scalability for E! Entertainment Television to grow their digital asset management system as more and more original content is created. The Silicon Storage Appliance allows E! Entertainment Television to easily create a flexible, open-systems storage network, allowing the IT staff to choose best-of-breed tools, workstations and servers.

Extreme Storage for E! Entertainment Television

As a term, "Digital Asset Management" can mean almost anything to anyone -- depending on your take and what you need to accomplish. It can be a simple storage system that uses a standardized labeling to identify where programs and footage are stored, or it can be a Knowledge Management System that catalogues and tracks everything in the company. And it can be everything in between.

As a writer in Digital Television recently put it, "while [Digital Asset Management] can be a murky and complex subject, the underlying rationales of DAM are simple enough. If you don't know what you've got, where it is, and what rights you have to use it, you can't make a profit from it."

For E! Networks, whose properties include E! Entertainment Television, Style, the recently launched E! International Network, as well as additional international channel partners serving Latin America, Spain, Israel, Middle East and Scandinavia, the move to Digital Asset Management is driven by the need to increase workflow productivity efficiencies and accelerate return on assets with the ability to repurpose content.

E! Entertainment Television provides a wide range of original, up-to-the-minute entertainment news, information and celebrity programming to movie, TV and music enthusiasts worldwide, and the eleven year old network has seen a substantial increase in the level of in-house production during the last five years. On average, E! Entertainment Television has seven field crews producing four hours of video a day, and the in-house studio shoots an average of about five hours a day. With this rise in production, the network has more than 250,000 video assets in its Los Angeles media center alone, with additional tape assets in other locations.

For the network's Digital Asset Management Initiative, E! Entertainment Television required a best of breed, open-systems infrastructure that would allow them to build a flexible, scalable centralized storage pool to handle their library-based content. After research and evaluation of storage solutions from leading vendors, E! Entertainment Television chose a Silicon Storage Appliance to provide a robust, easy to manage and scalable answer to their storage needs. "Silicon Storage Appliances bring us the flexibility to take advantage of all of our technology and integrate across multiple platforms," Jeff Mayzurk, vice president, technology, E! Networks, said."Management of the entire storage network is exceptionally easy, allowing our IT group to administer the system simply as we continue to scale the environment."

The consolidation of this library-based programming is driving E! Entertainment Television's digital asset management initiative, which transitions the network from a system of database search, manual retrieval, screening and interaction to a system that allows fully digital cataloging, retrieval, access and interaction -- all from the user's desktop. Interaction with library footage through the appliance-enabled storage network brings substantial workflow and productivity efficiencies including quicker, more accurate access to content and increased efficiencies in the pre-production process that include the screening of original content and rough cuts at the desktop.

The S2A Silicon Storage Appliance was chosen based on its unbeatable application productivity, cost-effective scalability, and ease of management capabilities. E! Entertainment Television is using the a S2A to manage 4.6 Terabytes of storage at the core of their data center in Los Angeles, with existing Solaris, Linux, Windows and Macintosh host platforms connected into the appliance to create a highly scalable, easy-to-manage storage network.

Silicon Storage Appliances overcome the many limitations of first generation storage networks, bringing application productivity with high QoS. The Silicon Storage Appliance serves at the core of the storage network, bringing tremendous bandwidth, superior virtualization and unmatched cost advantages to the production environment. For broadcasters and creative professionals needing high stream count, rock solid audio and video streams, storage and host scalability, and simplified management, DataDirect Networks' storage networking technology sets new standards in application productivity and plug and play simplicity.

"We're in the first phase of an ongoing program that takes advantage of technology to increase productivity for the network, and the Silicon Storage Appliance enables us to achieve our goals," Mayzurk continued. "We are now delivering content to a segment of our users, and we expect this system to scale exponentially as we extend the content to the entire E! Networks organization."

"Digital asset management provides businesses the ability to substantially increase revenue opportunities for their content without increasing costs," Robert Woolery, vice president corporate development, DataDirect Networks, said. "Best-of-breed content management requires a flexible storage network infrastructure that increases content productivity and workflow efficiencies while reducing operating costs. With its exceptional performance, scalability, and ease of management capabilities, the Silicon Storage Appliance delivers accelerated return on both IT investments and digital content assets."

As the recognized leader in storage networking appliance technology, with over 600TB of virtualized storage in use around the world, DataDirect Networks and their Silicon Storage Appliances make it easy, simple and trouble-free to increase productivity and manage applications, dramatically reducing TCO and increasing ROI.

Based on feedback gained from CTOs, CIOs and CEOs, DataDirect Networks created Silicon Storage Appliance technology to accelerate application productivity, simplify information management, and to lower operating costs for business. Technically superior to competitors in the field, Silicon Storage Appliances provide a substantially different and far more advanced approach to data access for data center use than NAS or first generation SAN solutions. "Silicon Storage Appliances bring us the flexibility to take advantage of all of our technology and integrate across multiple platforms."

The Silicon Storage Appliance operates at the core of the storage network, bringing unbeatable and guaranteed bandwidth to the production environment. It brings superior virtualization and parallelism to creative professionals, providing unmatched advantages to the production environment. Using silicon-based parallelism and intelligence in a much simpler architecture allows DataDirect customers to dramatically increase manageability, performance and reduce I/O bottlenecks that exist in first generation SAN technology.

DataDirect Networks' Silicon Storage Appliance technology allows creative professionals to accelerate their applications, providing data at least three times faster than existing Storage Area Networking (SAN) solutions and ten times faster than Network Attached Storage (NAS) technology, while managing storage simply and easily.

DataDirect's enterprise-class S2A Silicon Storage Appliance directly supports up to 512 workstations and 180 Terabytes of storage, simultaneously supporting a multitude of ingest, NLE, CG, playout and browse stations. With the ability to supply over 6000 hours of 50Mbit/sec MPEG2@ML content to 90 concurrent streams per appliance, the S2A Silicon Storage Appliance brings performance and scalability benefits to real-time broadcasting and production environments. DataDirect's "format independence" guarantees scaling of capacity and streams from highly-compressed all the way to HD and beyond. The S2A Silicon Storage Appliance, based on DataDirect's proven S2A appliance technology, brings a simple to deploy, easy to manage and affordable storage network appliance that allows departments and workgroups to achieve application performance gains, cost-effective scalability and simplified management. Each S2A Silicon Storage Appliance supplies an aggregate bandwidth. "We're in the first phase of an ongoing program that takes advantage of technology to increase productivity for the network, and the Silicon Storage Appliance enables us to achieve our goals."