Isilon Systems is providing its Isilon IQ video storage systems to Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium (OBMC) for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games (and Paralympic Games) in Vancouver, British Columbia, beginning this week and continuing through Feb. 28.
As the games’ official broadcaster, the OBMC, a partnership between CTV and Rogers Communications, will combine hundreds of hours of Olympic broadcast coverage onto a single, high-performance, highly scalable pool of Isilon Systems storage arrays. This will enable concurrent, multiuser access to content across the network, accelerating real-time editing and speeding content delivery to air and other delivery platforms.
During the Winter Games, the OBMC will deploy Isilon IQ as the central content repository for its video gateway broadcast portal, creating a single, shared pool of storage for all content to streamline ingest, encoding, editing and delivery of both live and prepackaged coverage. With Isilon, the consortium team on-site can access the same content from multiple locations and protocols, enabling users to simultaneously use the same content in real time, accelerating time-to-air.
CTV currently uses an Isilon network-attached storage array as the primary storage system supporting its broadcast operations, including integration with Harris NEXIO servers for HD content as well as all SD media. Working with reseller Applied Electronics, CTV has deployed numerous Isilon IQ clusters to provide its users with unfettered, highly concurrent media access, eliminating the inherent inefficiency and data fragmentation of its previous SAN storage system. With Isilon IQ, CTV is using 95 percent of its storage capacity with no degradation of performance, according to Isilon.
The OBMC will provide coverage of the Vancouver 2010 Games in English, French and other languages on multiple platforms. The consortium will deliver 4500 hours of coverage from the 2010 Winter Games, and every second of Olympic competition will be available live on one of the consortium's platforms. Official brands include CTV, TSN, RDS, RIS Info Sports, Rogers Sportsnet, OMNI, OLN, V, APTN, ATN, CTVOlympics.ca, RDSolympiques.ca, The Globe and Mail, Corus Québec and select Rogers radio stations across the country.
