Blue Ridge Public Television recently bought a Broadcast MediaCluster digital media server system from SeaChange International Inc. for use at WBRA-TV in Roanoke, WMST-TV in Marion and WSBN in Norton, all in Virginia. The new system will change how the stations manage TV content. According to SeaChange, this will be the largest media server deployment of its kind in the United States.
The deployed BMC 1637 will store more than 8,200 hours (at 8 Mbps) of content ready for immediate playback. The stations previously used mechanical archives to store content, and will now transition the material onto the standalone BMC.
The products in the BMC family are comprised of server nodes, which use SeaChange's Raid2 architecture to scale in storage and I/O capacity and provide a single-copy, fault-resilient media server. The BMC 1630 series uses 16 disk drives per node, with up to 56 I/Os in a seven-node BMC. Total storage on a seven-node 1630 is 8,200 hours of storage using 180-GB disk drives and expansion chassis.
