Computacenter overhauls VRT's central media storage

Computacenter overhauls VRT's central media storage ZAVENTEM, 1 June 2011 — Computacenter signed a contract with VRT last month for the overhaul, extension and maintenance of the public broadcaster’s central media storage. The system, known as the Common Media IT Infrastructure (CMII), contains image material, audio clips and photos among other items. As well as being a digital archive, the CMII is also used intensively by the news and sports service as a central production hub.

As well as being of great historical value, VRT’s central media storage system is also an important tool for today’s radio and television producers.

The news and sports service primarily uses the CMII as a production hub, where journalists can seek out and edit online material; programme-makers mainly use the archive function to search for images, audio clips, photos and documents. Thus the news and sports service’s main requirements are performance-related (because they need to be able to go live rapidly), whereas the programme-makers attach more importance to capacity and availability. This means that the proposed solution must satisfy a number of very strict requirements.

In a first phase, Computacenter will renew and extend the existing storage infrastructure in which all data are kept. For the next five years it will also look after the maintenance and further expansion of the CMII.

The idea is to improve the system’s stability and scalability, and to be future-proof. The new storage capacity will initially be 500 terabytes, and will increase further later on – partly as a result of the switch to HD television. Steps will also be taken to ensure HD compliance, 100% availability (the system must never go offline) and a guaranteed throughput. The solution that will be used for all this consists of a clustered database system on HP servers, HP storage and HP networking.

The new infrastructure should be operational from November 2011.

Lieven Troch, IT Systems Manager at VRT:
“Growth in storage capacity, maintaining high-performance, stable storage and keeping TCO under control are the main challenges in the years ahead. Constant improvement and expansion without any interruption to our services is vital. Computacenter’s expertise and professionalism will be of help to VRT in this.”

Lieven Bergmans, managing director of Computacenter Benelux:
"This is a strategically important project for VRT. We are therefore very pleased to be able to propose a high-quality, stable and scalable solution to them, as an independent partner for infrastructure solutions, and the project is a prestigious one for our Enterprise Technologies Department."