Case Study: Global Eagle Entertainment achieves up to 6x faster video exports and uninterrupted editing with NetApp EF-Series flash storage

Global Eagle Entertainment Redesigns Video Production Workflow with All-Flash Array

Global Eagle Entertainment, a provider of in‑flight entertainment and video postproduction services, faced a critical storage performance bottleneck: 17 editors working on large, high‑resolution files were competing with 20 transcoders for I/O, causing stutter, dropped frames, missed deadlines and forcing transcoding to run overnight.

The company deployed a NetApp EF‑Series all‑flash array with SANtricity (via CDW), eliminating the bottleneck so editors can work uninterrupted while transcoders run concurrently. Export times dropped from about 60–90 minutes to ~15 minutes (up to 6× faster), uptime and demo quality improved with full redundancy and automated failover, and overall productivity and costs were significantly improved.

Global Eagle Entertainment

Aziz Kapadia

Director of Global IT