Supporting Coverage During a Moment of National Significance
Following the death of Norway’s King, the broadcaster expanded its coverage to serve viewers during an important moment for the country. It carried additional channels and increased production activity, resulting in significant usage spikes across its infrastructure.
The broadcaster prioritized the coverage itself. Its technology needed to support journalists, producers, editors, and broadcast teams as requirements changed, without adding another concern during an already demanding period.
Qumulo provided the storage foundation for those workflows, helping the broadcaster accommodate increased activity while its teams stayed focused on delivering timely coverage to viewers across Norway.
For broadcasters, this is an important requirement of the infrastructure behind the newsroom. When circumstances change quickly, the technology needs to keep pace with the people and workflows it supports.
The Challenge: Simplifying Media Production
The broadcaster turned to Qumulo as it looked to modernize the storage supporting some of its most important digital production workflows.
Its existing environment relied on siloed storage, complicating production and creating data-movement jobs that wouldn't be necessary if teams could work from a common namespace. The broadcaster wanted an architecture that could handle large volumes of media data efficiently while improving cost efficiency, security, and operational simplicity.
The evaluation centered on three primary criteria: meeting the broadcaster’s technical requirements, an economic model that could support continued growth of its internal storage service, and meeting its security requirements.
For a broadcaster, those infrastructure requirements ultimately serve the production workflow. The underlying technology must give the people creating and delivering programming reliable access to the data they need, without adding unnecessary complexity.
The Solution: A Unified Storage Foundation
The broadcaster deployed Qumulo on an HPE Apollo platform with approximately 800 TB of usable storage.
The architecture gave the broadcaster a consolidated file platform designed to support demanding media workflows while reducing the storage silos and unnecessary data movement that complicated its previous environment.
The environment was designed for significant throughput, with a theoretical maximum aggregate multi-stream read performance of approximately 5,452 MB/s and multi-stream write performance of approximately 1,900 MB/s across the workflow.
Qumulo’s metadata-centric architecture also aligned with the broadcaster’s requirements around digitalization, security, and efficient management of its growing media data environment.
Infrastructure for an Unpredictable News Cycle
Broadcast organizations routinely plan infrastructure around expected data growth, scheduled productions, major sporting events, and evolving formats. News introduces a different requirement: the ability to respond when circumstances change with little warning.
An important event can require expanded programming, additional channels, and increased production activity in a very short period of time. The underlying infrastructure needs to accommodate those changing workflows without creating another obstacle for the teams responsible for delivering coverage.
During the broadcaster’s coverage following the King’s death, Qumulo supported the increased activity across the storage environment as additional channels were brought into the workflow.
The infrastructure was not designed around a single event. It was designed to support the broadcaster’s broader production requirements and provide a foundation that could adapt as those requirements changed.
Business Impact
Ready to support changing broadcast demands
When the broadcaster expanded its coverage following the death of Norway’s King, its Qumulo environment supported increased production activity and additional channels while the broadcaster focused on serving its viewers.
A unified foundation for media workflows
Qumulo helped the broadcaster reduce complexity from siloed storage and unnecessary data movement, providing a common storage foundation for key digital production workflows.
800 TB of usable storage
The HPE Apollo deployment provides approximately 800 TB of usable Qumulo capacity for the broadcaster’s media environment.
Designed for demanding production
The architecture delivers approximately 5,452 MB/s of theoretical aggregate multi-stream read performance and 1,900 MB/s of theoretical aggregate multi-stream write performance across the workflow.
The Takeaway: We Handle the Infrastructure. You Handle Your Business.
Broadcast infrastructure often does its most important work quietly.
The broadcaster chose Qumulo to simplify its storage architecture and support critical digital production workflows. When it expanded its coverage during a significant moment for Norway, that infrastructure supported its teams as production demands increased.
The result is a storage foundation designed to stay out of the way of the people doing the work, letting the broadcaster focus on what matters most: delivering the coverage its viewers need.