Case Study: Starz achieves 4K-ready high-performance storage and increased uptime with Brocade DCX 8510

Gen 5 Director-Class Storage Network Takes Starz from Terabytes to Petabytes

Starz faced escalating storage and performance challenges as daily edits consumed terabytes and legacy 4 Gbps SAN switches became a bottleneck for editors, a 700+ VM environment, and a VDI deployment. The company needed higher throughput, better manageability, and a scalable foundation to meet future 4K content demands.

Starz deployed redundant Brocade DCX 8510 backbones with Gen 5 (16 Gbps) Fibre Channel, Fabric Vision tools, and Brocade Network Advisor (including MAPS and Flow Vision). The upgrade eliminated I/O bottlenecks, cut file-download times from hours to minutes, improved uptime and diagnostics, simplified SAN management, and provided a highly expandable platform to support ongoing 4K growth.

Starz

Randy Stowell

Senior Manager of IT Services