GB Labs gives BBC English Regions the Space to manage
storage Inside Out
28 September 2011 – BBC
English Regions, a division of the BBC whose programmes focus on the
diversity of England, has deployed GB Labs’ storage technology to
better protect media content for its ‘Inside Out’ series which
looks at surprising real-life stories across England.
The BBC deployed GB’s Space Echo solution to protect content and
back up its SAN editing systems, following a series of hard disk
failures and a particularly bad server room accident during the
maintenance of an Inogen gas system. A story can take six months to
develop so they needed a low-cost solution that was capable of
protecting content over an extended period. Improving the resilience
of their current SAN (Storage Area Network) storage system to failure
was an essential part of their rollout plan for Apple Final Cut Pro
across 10 regions of the UK. Space Echo was an obvious choice as it
offered an active failover and useable secondary system, should their
main SAN fail, they could mount the Space Echo and carry on working
as per the last synchronization.
BBC English Regions implemented Space Echo following a recommendation
from GB Labs’ reseller Video Rescue. Building a complete failover
Fibre Channel SAN would have been significantly costly and
complicated given the capacity of HD storage required and the fact
that they wanted the two systems to be in different parts of the
building, so they welcomed the value for money, speed, and robust
nature of Space Echo with open arms.
With Inside Out running weekly programmes, the reseller had just two
days to install a complete Fibre Channel SAN, with Space Echo backup
in nine English Regions around the country. The Space Echo is located
in a separate server room in the building using the existing Ethernet
infrastructure. With the ability to connect harmlessly to the SAN
Meta Data network, the Space Echo provides an automated backup of the
entire SAN volume and offers a complete standalone failover solution
which can be easily mounted by their editors should the need arise,
this is critical to ensure business continuity so that they can
deliver programs to air.
The team at the BBC are looking forward to seeing how Space will
change the way they do things at English Regions. Not only are they
more reassured that their systems are capable of coping with whatever
they throw at them, but they can now concentrate on producing the
best content for their viewers without worrying about system
vulnerabilities along the way.
