Case Study: Canadian Television (CTV) achieves record-breaking multi-channel Olympic coverage with Dell EMC Isilon scale-out storage

Canadian Television - Customer Case Study

Canadian Television (CTV) faced the challenge of building the technology foundation for the 2010 Winter Games to handle an exponential surge in media files and simultaneous multi-user access across more channels than any Games in history. To support 24x7x365 broadcast operations and an existing near-capacity Isilon deployment, CTV turned to Dell EMC and its Isilon scale-out storage (OneFS) to meet demanding performance, concurrency, and reliability requirements.

Dell EMC delivered a scaled solution by doubling CTV’s Isilon capacity—deploying an additional 11-node 12000X cluster plus two Accelerator‑x performance nodes—to create a high-performance central content repository. The Dell EMC Isilon implementation eliminated SAN data fragmentation and single-copy file access, solved file‑locking issues, enabled concurrent streaming and editing via CTV’s Video Gateway, and supported field submissions; the result was hundreds of hours of unified Olympic coverage, greater channel throughput, and reliable 24x7 operations even while running the Isilon cluster at about 95% capacity.

Canadian Television

Michael Kozlakowski

Senior Manager of Media Technology Systems