IMG

Challenge

When looking for an IT storage partner, the biggest challenge facing global media and sports business IMG was finding a supplier who understood its complex and varied demands. The Service Level Agreements that it works to, measure delivery by the second. In such a time-pressured environment the company needs an IT storage solution with high bandwidth and high reliability which can also cope with extensive archiving and fast retrieval, as well as post-production editing.

IMG needed an ICT provider who understood the zero-failure environment that it operates in, and could deliver an affordable and scalable solution to allow the company to respond to the market as the demand for digital delivery grows. It was also looking for a progressive environment – the demand from broadcasters for real time footage never stops and therefore it needed a solution that could deliver in this environment.

Solutions

Huawei worked closely with IMG to understand its specific requirements. The solution it proposed appealed to IMG because the Huawei N8000 NAS system had been technically tested, had a high performance record in harsh environments, and therefore could deliver the sustained bandwidth the media industry requires. Rather than offer different solutions for different challenges – i.e. one unit for archiving, one for post-production and one for delivery – Huawei delivered blade servers to meet the full range of their needs. The approach will also help IMG move into the cloud environment and adopt virtualisation in the future.

As well as being an efficient and affordable approach which takes the immediacy of the media into account, this gradual change also reduces the chance of failure because meantime to failure is often batched, and the gradual change in disks removes this element of risk. In this progressive environment, there is no need to stop and no delays from major step changes in the capacity of the storage, which ensures that IMG is assured a high performance, always-on storage solution.

Value

Huawei has been working with IMG for over five years, and continues to make technical advances which ensure that the company maintains the sustained bandwidth it needs. It also works closely with IMG’s customers helping it to offer a high level of customer service and keeping the solution up-to-date.

In an environment where every second counts and each image must be better than the last, this process of continual improvement aligned with excellent customer service ensures that the solution meets both the current and future needs of IMG.

For example, by providing IMG complete flexibility, its need for capacity and performance planning for the London 2012 games was much reduced and thus a lot of the challenges were removed, while lowering overall business costs. Looking ahead, IMG Media has chosen the Huawei N8000 NAS system for its latest project,; capable of supporting multiple media types and streams through the independent scaling, horizontally and vertically the solution delivers the performance and capacity to exactly match IMG’s needs both now and in the future.