Red Pepper is a production and post business serving broadcasters, advertisers and corporate clients, in Africa and globally. Focused on creativity, across all their activities the company generates more than 4500 minutes of content each month.

This level of business calls for highly tailored workflows as well as carefully controlled storage and media management. This is particularly true in the case of high profile, fast turnaround reality television like the “Housewives” reality franchise, “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”, “Big Brother” and a popular Afrikaans music reality show “Die Kontrak”. Red Pepper initially invested in EditShare storage in 2013, and has scaled its facilities since then, most recently adding the powerful EFS 450 system, designed for demanding bandwidth applications.

EFS is a software-defined storage ecosystem built on commodity hardware and designed for practical workflows, with the ability to scale from a single storage node to an enterprise cluster, with a single namespace for simple management. The EFS 450 incorporates fault tolerance and very high bandwidth, with intelligent data distribution to ensure the timely support of large numbers of users.

It incorporates EditShare’s FLOW media management software with dedicated, redundant metadata servers. The workflow toolset is particularly important when multiple editors need access to content simultaneously, in applications like fast turnaround editing of programs with a very large number of sources.