Case Study: MLB Network achieves faster access to its massive baseball archive and streamlines 40PB tape storage with DataDirect Networks' MEDIAScaler

Streamlining Access to Petabytes of Live and Archived Video Assets

MLB Network, the 24/7 television home for Major League Baseball (and later NHL Network), faced rapidly growing HD archives—more than 650,000 hours readily available and roughly 7,000 hours ingested weekly—that stressed its tape-based repository. The team needed to migrate ~40 PB of data from 45,000 LTO‑4 tapes to T10K‑D media, accelerate access for producers and editors, support up to 40 concurrent post‑production jobs, and simplify storage management across two networks.

MLB deployed DDN’s MEDIAScaler as a nearly 1 PB high‑performance disk cache (with 40‑GigE connectivity) integrated with DIVArchive and the DIAMOND asset system. The platform enabled faster tape streaming and simultaneous workflows—partial file restores now take 2–5 minutes, tape‑to‑disk rates reach up to 1.8 Gb/s, job throughput doubled with no downtime, and storage management scaled to meet ongoing seasonal growth.

MLB Network

Tab Butler

Director of Media Management and Post-Production