Fox Sports Brazil Selects Object Matrix MatrixStore

Securing content in fast turnaround and high pressure environments (like live events with global audiences) can be a time consuming, stressful and a costly exercise. Providing simultaneous, instant access to that content from multiple teams with multiple workflows is another challenge altogether.

Fox Sports Interactive Media, LLC, a cable channels in Brazil, faced such a challenge from the International Broadcast Centre in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the 2014 World Cup Football tournament.

The Fox team detailed some of the challenges they would face
in order to be best prepared for the event:

• Ensuring footage is guaranteed to be protected and verified
• Protecting and accessing content from more than one workflow. They did not want to purchase, manage and support disparate pools of cheap storage
• Time and a quick turn around paramount. Taking time out to manage the storage solution and perform digital preservation tasks was not an option
• Data should be instantly accessible from within the Avid Interplay environment
• The storage platform needed to automate the protection of the content and guarantee its availability
• The storage would, at some point, be required for other departments and workflows within Fox in Brazil; as such, the solution would need to provide a longer term ROI.

It was evident to the Fox team that these requirements would not be suited to a storage platform with little or no workflow intelligence.

“Under the pressure of demanding environments you need solutions you trust and can rely on to do the job in hand with little or no intervention. Solutions like MatrixStore from Object Matrix Ltd, actually buy you time that we would have wasted managing disparate pools of storage,” said Luis Santos, director of engineering & operations, Fox Latin American Channels, Brazil.

The solution that kept a clean sheet
After considering different options ranging from clustered and object storage solutions to adding more ISIS chassis, MatrixStore from Object Matrix was selected as the optimum solution.

MatrixStore was chosen as it provided the closest match to the requirements of Fox
in terms of functionality, cost, integrations and ROI:

• Integration with Avid Interplay through the InterConnect plug-in from Object Matrix
• Centralised Vaults provide the ability to support multiple workflows in line with Fox’s own security and data management rules
• A scalable solution that requires little or no management
• Provided a strategic platform for future workflows within the organisation
• HA of data and automatic failover in case of a hardware failure
• Ability to add in future storage technologies as and when they become available

Object Matrix provided InterConnect, the archive application that enables content to be moved to and from the ISIS storage whilst keeping the Interplay database in sync. Object Matrix also provided client tools enabling content from other workflows to be protected at the highest levels (ORAD, Vizrt, etc.)

“Many media companies in Latin America are facing challenges around the protection, availability, and monetization of their assets. FOX Sports is one of a growing number of companies that chose a trusted and proven storage solution that additionally allows for the right metadata strategy during mass media events, such as the World Cup 2014: MatrixStore by Object Matrix,” said Guilherme Silva, CEO, CIS Group.

World Cup workflow elements
The initial workflow uses five 10GbE connected, 24TB MatrixStore nodes providing 100TB of nearline storage. Access to the vaults was required by Vizrt, ORAD and Avid workstations. Using DropSpot, MXFS and InterConnect (the archive plug-in for Avid Interplay environments) all workflows were supported with little or no management effort.