Gravity specified requirements that included high transactional and high throughput bandwidth for simultaneous recording of mezzanine compressed streams and processing of growing files. The system needed to take feeds from multiple EVS systems and make these files available to multiple post production systems. It also needed to support more than 40 production staff that needed to browse content.

Digistor proposed a dual redundant Infortrend GS4000 NAS system to deliver the high performance and capacity requirements. This was further refined with the help of Gravity’s engineers and combined, they settled on an 84 drive system which offered 1.3PB of RAW capacity and just over 1PB usable.

The system was pre-built and performance tested at Digistor HQ in Artarmon. Digistor then provided the necessary training to Gravity engineers prior to the system being shipped to Gravity’s Olympic Production Hub in Melbourne.

Gravity Media’s Head of Technology, Adrian Jenner explained, “Using 16TB NL SAS drives and Infortrend’s high density enclosures, the solution was relatively compact at only 8RU. For this application, we used quad 10Gb connections from each of the redundant RAID controllers to provide the necessary bandwidth and redundancy. The GS4000 also supports 25Gb and 40Gb connections and could scale to almost 900 drives and multiple PBs if required.”

The system was in operation 24 hours a day for the Olympics and then continued to be used in the same manner for the Paralympics without a single issue.

“The Infortrend solution didn’t miss a beat, it easily covered a full load-test of worst-case scenarios then proved its reliability through six weeks of solid operational use. This is particularly impressive as, after the initial commissioning and RAID build, the Infortrend solution was virtually plug and play to setup for the project. I have to mention the fact that Digistor were key in the initial commissioning phase and training of the systems features, as these were major advantages for us.”