WDBD Fox 40 in Jackson, Miss.—and its two sister TV stations—have transitioned from tape-based to disk-based archive storage with the Harris Nexio NXIQ 6000i clustered storage solution, Harris announced.
WDBD is using the system to archive its entire content library for all three television stations.
"Our old archive storage system had become expensive to maintain, and didn't offer the necessary technology to accommodate our plans for future storage of high-definition programming," said Robert Flanagan, chief engineer at WDBD-TV. "Since installing the NXIQ solution, we've already been able to maximize our storage capabilities, improve workflow management in our master control room and lower our operational expenses. At the same time, we knew we were making a future-proof investment that would allow us to affordably migrate to HD."
The NXIQ 6000i storage solution offers broadcast operations many advantages over traditional, tape-based archives—providing fast read/write transfer times, robust content protection and the ability to expand up to 576 TB of clustered storage in a single file system. At WDBD, the NXIQ 6000i is part of a storage area network based around legacy Harris transmission servers. The system is used to archive all of the station's on-air production and news programming, and is controlled with Sundance Archive Manager using SGL FlashNet as the archive management software layer.
"WDBD is a great example of a small-market station embracing leading-edge technology," said Tim Thorsteinson, president of Harris Broadcast Communications. "The rapid growth of digital content is forcing broadcasters of all sizes to face the same data storage, management and archiving challenges that, until recently, were experienced only by large enterprises."
Available from Harris through an OEM relationship with Isilon Systems, Nexio NXIQ is a family of enterprise-class, near-line/archive storage solutions that combine an intelligent, distributed file system with modular hardware for simplicity, resiliency and scalability. With their clustered storage architecture, ease of use, self-healing and highly redundant.
WDBD is owned by JW Broadcasting.
