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WGBH Deploys Cloudian Object Storage for Active Archive
[March 06, 2018]

WGBH Deploys Cloudian Object Storage for Active Archive


SAN MATEO, Calif., March 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cloudian, the innovation leader in enterprise object storage systems, today announced that WGBH, America’s preeminent public broadcaster and the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, has deployed a Cloudian system as a media active archive, resulting in 1,000-times-faster media access and automated data protection in a hybrid cloud environment.

The Cloudian HyperStore system replaces an existing tape library to provide the WGBH team with nearly-instantaneous access to data, easily-managed capacity growth and integrated rich metadata tagging for media search.

WGBH creates many of the best-known prime-time programs PBS distributes to its member stations, including Nova, Frontline, Masterpiece, Antiques Roadshow and American Experience. Over the last 50 years, the station has produced petabytes of content. Today, 4K and 8K video formats further accelerate the growth of media capacity, highlighting the urgent need for innovative media storage.

The solution includes two petabytes of Cloudian storage on premises, plus integrated public-cloud management. In this hybrid-cloud deployment, media is automatically replicated for disaster recovery (DR) purposes to Amazon Glacier, greatly simplifying data protection. For capacity expansion, media can also be tiered to Amazon S3, thus providing essentially unlimited capacity on demand.

The previous archive workflow typically required a day or more to retrieve media from tape and external hard drives; the new process retrieves media in seconds. Google-like search tools accelerate workflows via embedded metadata that allows the archive team to quickly find assets wherever they are located – whether on-prem or in the cloud – with a single search query.

“The ability to store the media with metadata attached is hugely compelling,” said Shane Miner, senior director of media technology at WGBH “By simplifying search and retrieval, we reduced the time it takes to pull something from the archives from 24 hours to a matter of seconds, which makes our production teams much more efficient.”



WGBH plans to complete the switch to object storage for all new content by August 2018 and then start systematically transferring older content into the system.

“We immediately saw the benefits of Cloudian when the Frontline production team needed to quickly archive media from their Avid editing platform to free up needed space, a task that previously would have taken more than a day,” Miner continued. “With Cloudian, we could offload media from their editing environment in minutes, which kept the production team on schedule.”


Miner concluded, “Cloudian lets us find and retrieve media in seconds rather than days, automate data protection and manage assets on-prem and in the cloud, all at less cost than our previous tape library.”

“WGBH is showing how object storage can help organizations cope with exploding data volumes and simultaneously streamline their operations,” said Jon Toor, CMO at Cloudian. “Their team has taken an innovative approach, combining metadata tagging, the cloud and scalable storage to greatly increase efficiency and service level agreements (SLAs) while cutting costs.”

To learn more about how Cloudian’s HyperStore is transforming WGBH’s ability to use its archived content, watch the video here.

WGBH will present its use of the system during the 2018 NAB Show at the Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology Conference (BEITC). The session will take place at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, April 11, 2018, in Room N256 of the Las Vegas Convention Center.

About WGBH
WGBH Boston is America’s preeminent public broadcaster, operating 10 TV and radio channels, and serving as the largest producer of PBS content for TV and the Web, including Frontline, NOVA, American Experience, Masterpiece and Antiques Roadshow, as well as lifestyle and children’s series. WGBH also is a major supplier of programming for public radio, and a leader in educational multimedia for the classroom, supplying content to PBS LearningMedia, a national broadband service for teachers and students. WGBH is a pioneer in technologies and services that make media accessible to those with hearing or visual impairments. It has been recognized with hundreds of awards including Emmys, Peabodys and more. Visit www.wgbh.org.

About Cloudian
Cloudian turns information into insight with an infinitely scalable platform that consolidates, manages and protects enterprise data. Cloudian data management solutions bring cloud technology and economics to the data center with uncompromising data durability, intuitive management tools, and the industry’s most compatible S3 API. Cloudian and its ecosystem partners help Global 1000 customers simplify unstructured data management today, while preparing for the data demands of AI and machine learning tomorrow.

Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter (@CloudianStorage) and Facebook, or visit us at www.cloudian.com.

Media Contact:
Rick Popko
10Fold
[email protected]
415-800-5381

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