When There Is No Second Take
Live sports broadcasting operates under a simple constraint: the show must go on. Every channel, live event, commercial break, replay, graphic, highlight, and production element must be available when the broadcast workflow needs it. Unlike many enterprise workloads, a production team cannot pause a live broadcast while an infrastructure problem gets resolved.
For one of the world's leading sports media organizations, that requirement extends across an increasingly diverse data environment. Its primary broadcast operation requires storage that can support live playout across its immense television channel portfolio. Production teams also need flexible cloud infrastructure for live editing, graphics, replays, and highlights during major sporting events. Beyond those immediate production requirements, the broader organization manages content repositories measured in tens and hundreds of petabytes, with requirements that keep growing.
The organization needed more than storage for a single workload. It needed a data platform that could support critical operations across data center and cloud environments, from live television to temporary event production and massive-scale content repositories, without multiplying the number of systems it had to manage.
The Challenge: Making Critical Infrastructure Invisible
Broadcast organizations have traditionally split their data across separate storage systems. Live playout demands consistent, predictable performance, so it typically runs on dedicated high-performance storage. Deep content libraries demand enormous capacity at a sustainable cost, so they land on separate archive tiers. Event production often gets its own infrastructure again. Each silo makes sense on its own terms, but together they create duplicate copies, constant data movement, and more systems to operate whenever content moves from one workflow to another.
Storage sits at the center of modern broadcast operations, but the production team should not have to think about it. For live channel playout, the organization was transitioning from its existing Dell PowerScale environment to Qumulo. Moving an established broadcast workflow required careful testing and validation before the production team could place live channels onto a new storage platform.
Qumulo worked with the organization and integration partner P1 to deploy the new clusters and address questions that came with transitioning from the previous storage environment. Because Qumulo presents the same standard file protocols the broadcast environment already relied on, the move did not require changes to the applications or to how users and systems connected to storage. The customer then conducted its own extensive testing while preparing for production.
When the organization was ready, it moved its live broadcast playout environment to Qumulo. The Qumulo team learned about the successful cutover about two weeks later because there was no storage escalation, emergency support call, or disruption requiring intervention. The environment simply worked.
For infrastructure supporting live television, that absence of drama may be the most meaningful outcome possible.
The Solution: Qumulo for Broadcast Operations
Qumulo now provides the file storage foundation supporting the organization's live channel playout environment. The deployment gives production teams an enterprise file platform designed to provide the consistent access and performance critical broadcast workflows require, while keeping the infrastructure largely invisible to the people producing and delivering content.
That same philosophy extends into the cloud. For major sporting events, the organization uses Cloud Native Qumulo on AWS to support Adobe Premiere workflows for live promotional editing, graphics, replays, and highlights. The cloud environment requirements were straightforward but demanding: stability, flexibility, and consistent performance.
CNQ delivers those requirements by combining the performance and familiarity of an enterprise file system with the economics of object storage, running on Amazon S3 underneath. Editors work with the file system they expect, while the organization pays for cloud storage on object storage terms.
These event environments also operate on a fundamentally different model than permanent broadcast infrastructure. Rather than maintaining the same storage footprint year-round, the organization can use CNQ when production requires it. Between tournaments, archive data can reside in Amazon S3, leaving no content on the production storage environment. As another event approaches, the organization can establish the required production environment and make the necessary content available to the workflow.
The result is a storage footprint that reflects the way the business actually operates: built up for the event and scaled back when it ends.
Ready When the Stakes Are Highest
Major live events demand confidence in every component of the production infrastructure. During one recent tournament, Qumulo assembled a six-person support team to ensure expertise and resources were immediately available throughout the live production.
The preparation reflected the importance of the workload. While the Qumulo team remained ready to assist, the storage platform performed as expected throughout the event, allowing production teams to stay focused on live editing, graphics, replays, and highlights.
The experience mirrored the organization's transition of live channel playout to Qumulo. After extensive testing and validation, the customer moved its production environment onto Qumulo without requiring intervention from the Qumulo team. Together, these experiences show what the organization needs from infrastructure supporting its most high-profile workloads: dependable technology backed by a team ready to engage when needed, though rarely called into action.
From Live Production to 100+ Petabytes
The relationship has also expanded beyond immediate broadcast and event-production workflows. Experience with Qumulo within the sports media organization helped introduce the platform to additional teams across the broader enterprise, where the data challenge was dramatically larger.
One of those environments required support for at least 100 PB in a single file system, with an architecture capable of growing toward exabyte scale. The organization also wanted economic simplicity: a scalable model that could support a massive content repository and encoding workload without creating an increasingly complicated, siloed file ecosystem as data grew.
This is where consolidation becomes central. Rather than spreading the content library across multiple file systems or separate storage tiers, the resulting Qumulo Stratus deployment brings it together in a single file system. The environment begins with approximately 100 PB of usable capacity, with plans to grow beyond 160 PB over the course of the commitment, and establishes an architecture designed to accommodate continued data growth without adding new silos.
Scale, however, was only part of the requirement. The organization periodically needs additional resources beyond those available in its data centers to process its content library. Historically, meeting those demand spikes required complex file movement between environments. Stratus, CNQ, and Cloud Data Fabric provide the foundation for a hybrid approach in which data center and cloud resources can participate in the workflow without treating each environment as an isolated infrastructure island.
What began as a storage platform supporting individual production requirements has therefore expanded into a much broader data architecture spanning persistent infrastructure, cloud production, and massive-scale repositories.
One Platform, Different Operating Models
Live channel playout: Persistent, business-critical infrastructure that must remain available, reliable, and predictable every day.
Live event production: Temporary and elastic, with infrastructure requirements that can scale rapidly around a tournament or event and change dramatically once it ends.