Category
Post & network production facilities
Submitted by SGI Design Team NBAE: Mike Rokosa, VP eng.; Keith Horstman, VP, digital media mgmt. sys.; Dana Stone, dir., digital media mgmt.; Andrew Surfer, dir., sys. eng.
SGI: Bill Buhro, media solutions architect; Dale Brantly, sys. solutions architect Technology at work SGI
Altix 450 servers
Altix XE240 servers
CXFS shared filesystem
Data Migration Facility
Digital Mass Storage Engine
InfiniteStorage 4500
InfiniteStorage 10000
InfiniteStorage NEXIS
1000 NAS
Snell & Wilcox Asteroid SD/HD MPEG-2 MXF
encoders
StorageTek SL8500 6000 LTO tape library
NBA Entertainment doubles production and storage capacity for HD ingest and archiving
NBA Entertainment’s (NBAE) all- digital, centralized media production and asset management facility in Secaucus, NJ, has been fully functional for more than a year. In the past year, the all-digital, SGI-integrated workflow has allowed the NBAE to capture, catalog and store every play as it happens in real time. The SAN, based on an SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS shared filesystem, provides real-time storage for high-res online editing systems while handling low-res proxy and cue management using NBA-written applications. During daily broadcast production, the NBAE ingested more than 45,000 assets into the system over the last year, storing about 30,000 hours of content, or a little more than 1.5 petabytes of data. Those assets are a combination of all of last season’s live NBA games and field material, plus historic content.
The volume of asset ingest is significantly more than SGI or NBAE anticipated in the initial system design, which was conceived as having at least two years of built-in growth capacity. The NBAE originally planned to take up to seven years to get the entire archive, dating back to 1946, into digital format. In order to take better advantage of the workflow improvements, the NBAE has accelerated its library conversion. Doubling the size of the media management system, where material is ingested into the SGI storage using Snell & Wilcox iCR encoders, will allow for as many as 100,000 assets to be ingested annually.
To meet this directive, a second 3000-slot StorageTek SL 8500 robot system is being added, which will take the NBAE’s total nearline capacity to 6000 LTO data tapes and significantly improve workflow by moving data into the system quicker and retrieving data more rapidly. The Fibre Channel fabric is expanding from 128 ports to 192 ports, and the system is migrating from SGI’s legacy technology to three SGI Altix 450 systems, each with 16 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 16GB RAM per processor, running Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. This doubles the capability of the SAN from 16 concurrent feeds to 32 concurrent feeds. An additional SGI InfiniteStorage 4500 system with 16TB of storage is being added to the existing spinning disk storage.
The NBAE’s low bit rate, browsing content capabilities are being upgraded to an SGI InfiniteStorage NEXIS 1000 NAS system driven by SGI Altix XE240 servers with Intel Xeon processors, and 250TB of SGI InfiniteStorage 10000 storage. The 250TB represents about six seasons’ worth of content, and will allow much more low-res content directly online.
The doubling of production and storage capabilities will also impact the next level of expansion — instituting remote ingest and playout via a planned private NBA network to the individual team locations.
