The Briefing Room

ExaStore offers easy management and scalability within a single infrastructure

London, UK – 3 September 2008 – The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service has installed the ExaStore 2008 Clustered NAS System to support news production and archiving for the production platform and play out platform-multimedia workflow.

“ExaStore’s infrastructure supports collaboration, which is critical, as more than 125 people can potentially be accessing the system simultaneously,” says Elsa Shweid, Exanet’s Sales Director. “ExaStore offers the BBC an easy-to-manage system that guarantees high performance and scalable capacity, all within the same infrastructure.”

BBC will store more than 6,500 hours of real-time high resolution video and low-resolution proxy media on its ExaStore storage system. At the same time, ExaStore is providing a bandwidth of more than 600 Mbytes/second, with the speed supporting individual access as well as rendering and media conversions running in the background.

With ExaStore, the BBC is enjoying increased resource efficiency with immediate access to new digital material. Massively scalable and cost-effective online archiving completely eliminates the need for tape, reducing time and material costs. ExaStore’s simplified management using a single IP address allows the IT team to centrally configure and manage all storage across every workstation and server concurrently, saving them time and effort.

The demands of the news industry dictate that the BBC news staff has rapid access to the system on a moment-to-moment basis. ExaStore’s virtualized file system ensures that critical data is at everyone’s fingertips.

The BBC, one of the largest broadcasting corporations in the world in terms of audience numbers, employs 26,000 staff in the United Kingdom alone. More than 100 employees are using this first ExaStore implementation at the BBC.

“We’ve gained a rapid foothold in the M&E market worldwide due to our collaboration-enhancing features,” concludes Hugo Georlette, Exanet’s Vice President of Sales, EMEA & APAC. “We enjoy playing the silent storage partner so great institutions like the BBC can focus on the pursuit of production excellence.”

About Exanet

Exanet designs clustered NAS systems that leverage the latest processing technology, facilitating growth with peace of mind. Exanet ExaStore Clustered NAS systems meet the most demanding business needs with scalable capacity and performance up to petabytes, virtualized storage, and enterprise class features. ExaStore systems are available through channel partners worldwide. For more information please visit www.exanet.com.