Isilon Clustered Storage for NBC’s Coverage of the Beijing Olympic Games

Isilon Systems announced that they have been selected to provide Isilon IQ clustered storage to NBC during the network’s coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, August 8-24. The announcement was made today by Craig Lau, Vice President, Information Technology, NBC Olympics and Brett Goodwin, Vice President of Marketing and Business Development, Isilon Systems.

Described as the most ambitious single media project in history, NBC will present more than 3600 hours of broadcast coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. NBC will be using Isilon IQ clustered storage as the primary, on-site storage solution for media created on its HD EVS XT server system and will be archiving its entire collection of low resolution Olympic footage onto Isilon IQ, ensuring unmatched data availability and reliability for this critical content. NBC is among hundreds of media and broadcast companies who rely on Isilon IQ to create, access, deliver, and archive the next generation of digital media.

"NBC’s broadcast of the Olympic Games in Beijing is an unprecedented media event, broadcasting thousands of hours of programming via standard and high definition, online, on-demand, and even on-the-go wireless coverage over just a seventeen day period," said Craig Lau, Vice President, Information Technology, NBC Olympics. "This epic undertaking requires the latest innovations in broadcast infrastructure and Isilon clustered storage plays an important role in our media workflow, enabling immediate, reliable access to content 24×7 to help power our Olympic broadcast operations."

In Beijing, NBC is primed to deliver the first-ever television broadcast of the Olympic Games available completely in high-definition. Following NBC’s successful use of Isilon IQ for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens and the 2006 Olympic Winter Games in Torino, NBC is using Isilon IQ as a core storage repository for two key aspects of NBC’s Olympic broadcast workflow.

First, to serve the real-time editing and production needs on-site in Beijing, NBC has deployed separate Isilon clusters in the International Broadcast Center and two other venues to store and access content produced by its HD EVS XT server system. Isilon IQ delivers unmatched performance, ease of use and data availability, providing a single, shared pool of highly scalable storage to support the seamless ingest, edit and play-to-air capabilities of the six-channel XT server system. Second, NBC will deploy Isilon clustered storage to archive low resolution video of the Olympic Games, ensuring this valuable content is immediately and reliably accessible by producers for later editing and broadcast.

In April of 2007, Isilon announced a multi-year agreement with NBC Universal to use Isilon’s IQ clustered storage systems to archive and access its growing stores of media programming, including TV and productions, movies, news and sports. NBC Universal has deployed Isilon IQ to complement and, in some cases, replace traditional tape based technology which allows for faster access times and increased reliability.

"We are currently witnessing a sea change in the way digital media is being created, managed, and delivered and consequently, an entirely new storage infrastructure is required to handle the insatiable demands of tomorrow’s media consumer," said Brett Goodwin, Vice President of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ clustered storage is designed specifically to meet the unique demands of media and content delivery companies who are serving up the next generation of entertainment."

NBC Olympics

Isilon Systems