NBA Entertainment currently sends game broadcasts, clips and other NBA content to 214 countries worldwide.
NBA Entertainment, based in Secaucus, N.J., has entered into a technology partnership with Silicon Graphics to deploy a massive networked attached storage system to handle its valuable program assets.
Serving as the NBA’s clearinghouse where same-day and older game footage is stored and repurposed for a variety of platforms and services, NBA Entertainment has purchased an SGI InfiniteStorage NAS 2000 solution that provides universal data access and flexible, scalable and secure high-performance network-attached storage (NAS). The system now in place, which can catalog and store the equivalent of nearly half the contents of the Library of Congress, also uses a StorageTek SL8500 tape library for storing older content. The organization plans to expand storage to 50TB of information in the future.
Engineers from SGI’s Professional Services installed the system, and wrote custom software to bridge the gap between the InfiniteStorage NAS 2000 system and more than a dozen editors working on Pinnacle NLE systems.
NBA Entertainment’s broadcast production facility will now be able to capture every televised professional basketball play, categorize it, and store it for fast and easy retrieval. Those capabilities are essential, as NBA Entertainment’s digital facility is a quick turn around production and distribution point for digital media globally every night the NBA is in action. NBA Entertainment currently sends game broadcasts, clips and other NBA content to 214 countries worldwide.
As the need for more storage and networked production capability increases, the InfiniteStorage system in use can be expanded to increase network bandwidth while adding hundreds of terabytes of data. The SGI NAS solution is also capable of growing into a full storage area network (SAN) with SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS, which combines the flexibility and ease of use of NAS with the power and speed of SAN architecture, without needing any data conversion.
For more information, visit www.sgi.com.
