Proact Helps Swedish Kanal 75 to Manage Big Data

Kanal 75, Sweden’s producer of TV
and Internet services for harness racing, has hired Proact IT Group AB to manage the company’s growing information volumes.

Proact has implemented a new storage solution in order to meet Kanal
75’s needs.

Kanal 75 is a wholly-owned subsidiary of
ATG (Aktiebolaget Trav & Galopp). ATG supports equestrian sports in Sweden
and is the coordinating body for gambling involving harness racing and horse
racing. Kanal 75 produces more than 100 hours of horse racing broadcasts every
week which appear on Swedish TV, at the premises of ATG representatives and on
ATG.se. The various services are available through digital TV, HD-TV, online
TV, etc.

Kanal 75 has been working for a long time
on a major modernisation project for its technical solutions for media
production. Its storage solution has a central part to play in this regard, and
the company has opted to purchase storage as a service from Proact. This means
that Kanal 75 will only pay for the storage it actually uses.

"Outsourcing
our storage solution was a strategic decision on our part. This will allow us
to focus on our core business and allow professionals in the field of
information management to deal with it," says Johan Eriksson, head of
technology at Kanal 75.

Kanal 75 creates recorded and live
broadcasts from more than a thousand harness races and horse races in Sweden
every year. The race videos are transmitted to the production centre and
processed for further distribution. This company has stringent demands in terms
of access, and it needs to be able to access, process, move and archive large
amounts of information.

Proact manages Kanal 75’s storage
requirements using a clustered storage solution which has been specially
developed to handle what is known as big data, or large volumes of unstructured
data. Data growth has increased sharply, in terms of both increasing file sizes
and numbers of files, since the decision was made to produce material in new
formats and HD quality. This placed considerable demands on the Proact
solution. EMC’s Isilon was eventually selected, and Kanal 75 is one of the
first companies in the Nordic region to use this solution.

"This is an exciting solution and will help
many of our customers to cope with the challenges involved in managing large,
unstructured data volumes. This solution, which is mirrored, also has an
integrated snapshot function which, besides eliminating traditional backups,
will give Kanal 75 very high uptime levels and strong DR,"
says Lena Eskilsson, regional manager at Proact.