Published on 18-May-2012
"I had to do the calculations for the IBM solution twice, because I could not believe that the amount of savings could be true." - Constantinos Colombus, Chief Technology Officer, AlphaTV
Customer:
AlphaTV
Industry:
Media & Entertainment
Deployment country:
Greece
Solution:
Storage Consolidation
Overview
AlphaTV, a television station headquartered near Athens, Greece, has been transmitting news and entertainment programming to millions of viewers throughout the country since 1996. This translates to more than 15 years’ worth of programming archives—from daily soap operas, to movies, to documentaries. Not surprisingly, storage is an issue. But as AlphaTV realized they needed a more efficient, cost-effective and robust storage solution to manage their vast programming library, they turned to IBM Storage for help.
Business need:
AlphaTV needed to store huge amounts of television programming content while shrinking their storage footprint, creating efficient backups and reducing storage management costs.
Solution:
AlphaTV deployed the IBM Linear Tape File System™, IBM Linear Tape-Open Ultrium 5 (LTO-5) tape drives and IBM System Storage® TS3200 Tape Library Express to handle their television programming archive.
Benefits:
The IBM solution reduced physical storage footprint from 140 square meters (1,507 square feet) to 36 square meters (388 square feet), lowered storage maintenance costs from €30,000 (USD$39,369) to €7,000 (USD$9,186) and can now store three times the number of television series’ for €60-70 (USD$79-92), versus €9,000 (USD$11,811) for one series on DVCPRO.
Video
AlphaTV, a television station headquartered near Athens, Greece, has been transmitting news and entertainment programming to millions of viewers throughout the country since 1996. This translates to more than 15 years’ worth of programming archives—from daily soap operas, to movies, to documentaries. Not surprisingly, storage is an issue. But as AlphaTV realized they needed a more efficient, cost-effective and robust storage solution to manage their vast programming library, they turned to IBM Storage for help.
Video Transcript
AlphaTV Customer Reference Video
As Produced Transcript
Constantinos Colombus
CTO, AlphaTV
John Argiropoulos
Head of Film Library, AlphaTV
Constantinos Colombus: A typical news gathering day begins in the morning when the news department will hold a meeting discussing about what news are currently hot, then we send out the crews mostly in Athens.
I think we will capture everything on a solid state drives. They will ingest them into the servers and immediately after these are ingested, they will start to edit the material. The material is available to the journalist immediately after we start this process. They will go to the edit suite and deliver the final product.
When we started in the 1993 we were using Betacam SP. We converted our inside format to DVCPRO in 2000 and all these years we had to store these tapes in huge rooms.
John Argiropoulos: I believe in Greece, we have some financial problems. Someone here in Alpha TV has to find a new solution to save money instead of giving money for tapes.
Constantinos Colombus: We have to consider economy of scale and at the same time we consider that it will be quite expensive to maintain all these VTRs that were needed to playback the tapes and at the same time we were spending a lot on tapes. We also realized that these VTRs were quite obsolete so sooner or later we should purchase new VTRs and this could lead us to an endless loop.
Constantinos Colombus: And as we were trying to cut expenses all over, that was one of the phase that we pinpointed like ready to not to spend any more money on that. After reading and asking all the vendors, we realized that IBM had a solution that could be -- that could play for us
John Argiropoulos: The new type of the system that we use now is the LTFS or LTO-5.
Constantinos Colombus: The cost to maintain the 140 square meters archive for the old fashioned tape is 30,000 and this cost can be transformed to just 7,000 when relocating the TV channel on a 36 square meter of storage.
At this moment, everything is stored in LTFS. Then easily, and at a bargain, we duplicate the tape and this tape is being sent to our disaster recovery site so if anything happens, we can preserve our content.
John Argiropoulos: Suppose someone needs to see a program from – we have stored it and filed in LTO-5, it's very easy for us to copy for him just to take it from the LTO-5, copy and send it to his computer. It's very easy for us. It's time for two minutes or less.
Constantinos Colombus: This new solution means to Alpha cost saving and fast access to the material.
I think that LTFS is the reason why tape will be innovative again.
This solution was absolutely the right solution for Alpha TV.
Products and services used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware:
Storage: Tape & Optical Storage, Storage: TS3200 Tape Library
Legal Information
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2012 IBM Corporation Systems and Technology Group Route 100 Somers, New York 10589 Produced in the United States of America May 2012 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com and Linear Tape File System are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml Linear Tape-Open, LTO, the LTO Logo, Ultrium and the Ultrium logo are trademarks of HP, IBM Corp. and Quantum in the U.S. and other countries. The content in this document (including currency OR pricing references which exclude applicable taxes) is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. IBM Business Partners set their own prices, which may vary. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. It is the user’s responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any other products or programs with IBM products and programs.