Viacom International Media Networks Accelerates Distribution of Multimedia Content with EMC Isilon

IBC 2012, AMSTERDAM - September 06, 2012 -

EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) today announced that Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN) has standardized on EMC® Isilon® scale-out storage for all of its media content in Europe.

VIMN is comprised of many of the world's most popular multimedia entertainment brands, including MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET, Paramount Channel, VH1, VIVA, COLORS, Game One and Tr3's MTV, Música y Más, which are seen globally in more than 600 million households in 170 territories and 37 languages via more than 200 locally programmed and operated TV channels. With more than two petabytes of Isilon storage, VIMN has improved the speed and delivery of its multimedia content across Europe.

Customer Benefits:

• Streamlined Content Publishing—With Isilon, VIMN accelerated content publishing 150 percent by streamlining end-to-end content development, access, distribution and transmission.
• Improved Efficiency—VIMN's integration between Isilon, media asset management and playout systems automates flow of content to program schedules, reducing the number of operators per 25 channels from five to just one.
• Increased Performance—Isilon delivers 8,000 gigabytes of content per day to 100 playout servers in each media center simultaneously, ensuring that content is consistently available for daily program schedules.
• Enhanced Agility—Isilon enables VIMN to supply its creative teams with new storage resources in hours instead of weeks.

Customer Challenges and Solution:

VIMN's prior distributed storage environment was difficult to scale and limited in performance, affecting its ability to reliably deliver media content to the broadcast channels. With media content growing by 600 terabytes annually, VIMN needed a centrally managed storage infrastructure integrated with its media asset management system to streamline and simplify content access, publishing and transmission.

After evaluating solutions from multiple storage vendors, VIMN chose EMC Isilon scale-out storage for its excellent scalability, performance and reliability. VIMN deployed Isilon NL-Series systems to consolidate media content from multiple sites across Europe to two primary media centers in London and Amsterdam, providing nearline storage for a global, file-based content delivery system. An additional Isilon system is deployed in VIMN's London content production environment, which also enables content delivery to locations outside of Europe, including Australia.

Isilon InsightIQ™ analytics enables VIMN to optimize performance and workflows, and forecast future storage needs. With Isilon's OneFS file system, VIMN maintains one global source of content for use with multiple reference language tracks across all multimedia channels. For disaster recovery and content sharing, VIMN is implementing Isilon SyncIQ® software to automatically replicate content between its two media centers.

VIMN's Evertz Mediator media asset management, Grass Valley® K2 Edge™ integrated automated playout system and MediaGenex channel management systems are integrated with the Isilon infrastructure.

Customer Quotes:

Tim Bertioli, Senior Director, Media & Technology Infrastructure, Viacom International Media Networks

"Our international content workflow is now almost completely file-based — access to content is streamlined for editing, compliance and desktop viewing. As a result, we've accelerated time-to-publication of new international content by 150 percent. By giving the channel teams more control over media content, Isilon has enabled us to execute on a completely new content publishing model in the broadcast industry."

"It's absolutely critical to our business to deliver complied, quality checked content to the networks in as short a time as possible. With Isilon, we no longer worry about being able to access the content for transmission in time. Isilon has given us real peace of mind."

"Our annual EMA event, as an example, is distributed to a potential global audience of over 600 million homes. It's vital that we are able to create and distribute multiple versions of the show for linear, mobile and on-demand viewing quickly — centralizing our storage for the different stages of our file-based workflow makes this possible."

"For our content production system in London, we can handle administration with one less full-time engineer because of Isilon's streamlined manageability and reliability. Overall, one engineer spends about an hour per week managing Isilon and we're saving a substantial sum per year in support costs. We pretty much just leave Isilon alone."

Roderick Aal, VP Technology, North and UK, Viacom International Media Networks

"Adopting the Isilon OneFS storage solution enables VIMN to store more content in more formats and make it instantly accessible simultaneously to more people at a lower cost than done before on linear tape-open digital file based tape storage."

"The Isilon OneFS storage solution has not just reduced costs, but has allowed us to make video content, such as video on demand, instantly accessible to more people at a lower cost. We've also been able to allow disparate applications and clients to share a single pool of storage that all users can access instantly and accelerate ROI on storage. Ultimately, VIMN has adopted a storage solution optimized specifically for the unique requirements of digital content, enabling us to store more content in more formats."

"In general, Isilon OneFS has enabled our businesses to use a common storage solution across multiple applications in the digital content lifecycle including production, archiving and delivery."

Additional Resources:

• Learn more about EMC Isilon
• Connect with EMC via Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and ECN