US TV Broadcasting WQED Adopts Infortrend Storage

Infortrend Technology, Inc. announced that WQED, a TV broadcasting company in the USA, has leveraged EonStor GS unified enterprise storage solution to improve efficiency of their M&E post-production and TV broadcasting workflows.

Founded in 1954 and based in Pittsburgh, PA, WQED is a community-supported TV company specializing in public media post-production and broadcasting. For the growing amount of content, i.e., educational, cultural and entertainment programs, as well as for media post-production workflow, they needed storage solution with capacity and performance.

The existing storage could not satisfy the needs of the company neither with throughput nor with capacity requirements causing video playback stuttering, inability to expedite, edit, encode videos on time, which considerably slowed down their projects. Moreover, the outdated storage required excessive maintenance, which was time- and cost-consuming for IT support department.

Provided by Infortrend’s partner, Intelligent Technology, Inc., WQED upgraded to a unified storage EonStor GS 4060 operating in 100GbE environment. It is paired to an encoder server and 14 media editing workstations equipped with Intel CPU and running Adobe Creative Cloud suite. The storage solution provides 1PB storage capacity in 4U form factor and delivers 10GB /s read and 5.5GB /s write throughput performance to ensure smooth M&E workflows.

“We are excited to see WQED TV integrating Infortrend EonStor GS 4060 unified storage solution solving the pain points of media production and broadcasting workflows. It has been Intel’s great pleasure working with Infortrend to develop the EonStor GS series of storage platforms featuring Intel Xeon Processor, delivering excellent performance for accelerating M&E applications and video demands,” said Jason Ziller, GM, client connectivity division, Intel Corporation.

To store the growing volume of video assets, GS offers simple scalability options: the company can scale-out the system with a new GS storage and scale-up with JBOD. Moreover, it has redundant design, ensuring HA and minimal downtime. All the components are modular and hot-swappable, allowing for easy maintenance. IT staff can monitor the GS system through the intuitive management interface EonOne.

“Having been a customer of Infortrend storage for years, upgrading the existing storage for broadcasting to an Infortrend solution was a natural choice. We are extremely satisfied with the stability and price of their storage solutions,” said Paul Byers, executive director of engineering, WQED.