Case Study: Chengdu TV achieves HDTV readiness and 4x faster media production with Dell EMC Isilon

Embracing new HD broadcasting standards

Chengdu TV, the provincial broadcaster serving more than 30 million residents, faced a 2015 industry-wide shift to high-definition TV and needed to overhaul nearly all of its infrastructure to meet HDTV’s higher bandwidth, capacity and availability requirements. After evaluating partners, Chengdu TV selected Dell EMC’s Isilon scale-out storage solution (including EMC Isilon X410, X400, X200, SmartConnect and SmartQuotas) to provide the scalability, 10GbE performance and high availability required for HD production and distribution.

Dell EMC implemented five Isilon clusters (three X410 clusters with 18 nodes for online editing, one X400 cluster with 4 nodes for archival, and one X200 cluster with 8 nodes for broadcasting) delivering 1.3 PB of capacity and zone-based performance control. The Dell EMC deployment delivered four-times the performance of the old SD workflow, supports about 720 hours of HD programming per month, simplified storage management, improved availability for live broadcasting, and gives Chengdu TV the scalability and flexibility to pursue 4K and online media opportunities.