France Televisions group (French public television network) has chosen Object Matrix’s MatrixStore to protect its file-based content at its overseas locations.
During a review of playout operations in remote territories (French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Wallis & Futuna, Saint-Pierre & Miquelon) France Televisions identified the requirement for secure nearline storage.
“We embarked on a comprehensive review on the future of our playout facilities earlier this year,” said Erwan Roth, deputy technical director. “Until then we had a standard architecture built around video servers connected with an LTO storage robot for medium or long term archives. We consulted several manufacturers during this process, and for the playout platform we chose Omneon. In terms of price and technology, they made the best offer. However our storage capacity requirement was greater than the storage present in the playout servers, and therefore we looked for a nearline parking solution. Again we studied the market offerings and Object Matrix with their MatrixStore solution was proposed to us by French systems integrator DID Technology. Once they had presented the benefits of MatrixStore, we selected that solution.”
Updating the infrastructure at the remote locations is always a complex process, given some of the stations are composed of a hybrid between locally produced broadcast content and broadcast content delivered from central operations near Paris, in Malakoff.
The facilities in Guadeloupe and French Guyana house both broadcast and production operations; however broadcast from other stations is managed from HQs in Malakoff.
As a consequence, France Televisions Guadeloupe and Guyana needed greater capacity; as outlined by Roth, “The requirement for nearline storage is to protect 15 months of content, with a broadcast codec DV 25. For obvious cost reasons we could not use the Omneon and we did not wish to continue using LTO robot platforms due to limitations we have experienced with those solutions in the past. For us, the best solution was to increase our nearline capacity, and in this specific case, we needed 100 to 150TB at both sites”.
MatrixStore is being used in two ways: as a secure nearline platform and also providing file sharing capability using FTP to access the content.
“Regarding the MatrixStore solution, I admit I was amazed by the simplicity of installation and the ease of use. At the stations I have no engineers, but with MatrixStore there is no need for specialist training to understand how it works.”
