MediaVast
MediaVast® stores massive amounts of digital content on reliable StoreVaults
Customer OverviewMediaVast, Inc. is a leading provider of high-quality visual content and related services to print and online media, advertising agencies, broadcast networks, mobile carriers, communication agencies and other publishing enterprises. The company operates a portfolio of four visual content brands: WireImage® (www.wireimage.com), FilmMagic® (www.filmmagic.com), Contour Photos® (www.contourphotos.com), and WINCreps (www.wincreps.com). MediaVast provides image syndication through a global network of agency affiliates in over 50 countries.
Launched in 2001 and headquartered in New York, the company has branch offices in major commercial centers such as Madrid, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Miami, Las Vegas, Atlanta, London, Tokyo, Sydney, Hamburg, and Shanghai.
Over three hundred committed professionals and over a thousand freelancers produce massive quantities of rich photographic content, which MediaVast distributes on demand to press and news agencies. Breaking stories can generate an avalanche of demands for exactly the right photo.
Customer Challenges
MediaVast must be able to manage a massive amount of data on a regular basis —40 TB of data is accessed daily from 135 different servers. They add and serve new images each day, with demand spiking unpredictably when driven by breaking stories. In addition, they must safeguard existing images for reference. This kind of unpredictable growth made planning and maintaining a reliable storage infrastructure difficult and measurably expensive. When content is not available, license revenue is lost immediately.
They licensed their growing photo and video footage archives of news events, entertainment, sports and stock photography as well as high-end celebrity portraits. The archives grew larger daily because past images were too valuable to destroy and new ones were continuously added. New additions were also replicated to Los Angeles from New York, doubling storage capacity needs.
Eight FTP servers were serving data through Microsoft Internet Information Server, with large direct-attached storage arrays on the back end. Hugh Weiss, the IT Manager for MediaVast, had been using very low cost SATA RAID arrays from Promise Technology to store the photo archives. The SATA arrays were directly attached to the IIS servers and suffered from poor performance and frequent crashes. Each crash required sending an IT expert over to the data center to power cycle the drives and rebuild the arrays. The process took almost half a day, plus the manual intervention trip and time.
Reliability was of the utmost importance, as the company was tired of losing dollars and time on traditional RAID arrays, and Hugh was also concerned about MediaVast’s budget. He did not want to lock up thousands of dollars of capital in a single massive appliance.
Another growing concern for MediaVast was storage management. Images were spread across multiple servers and arrays with various firmware versions, hardware revisions capacity points, and management tools. Ideally, MediaVast was looking for a mid-range storage appliance that provided enterprise-class functionality and reliability.
Customer Solution
Hugh decided to look for available options in the market that could put an end to his storage management woes. He needed a product that was cost effective yet refused to compromise on reliability. He explored options such as EMC’s CLARiiON AX150, products from BlueArc, and the Adaptec Snap Server, but he knew his search had come to an end when he learned about the StoreVault S500. Other products just could not match the StoreVault’s combination of functionality, reliability and affordability.
Initially, Hugh installed four StoreVault units in New York, and after seeing the reliability and flexibility immediately followed up with more units. Management is a piece of cake—a simple GUI, with a Windows look and feel, allows him to connect to any StoreVault unit or install new ones right from his desktop.
Hugh has now installed 14 StoreVault S500s in New York. After playing a bit with NAS volumes, he chose the iSCSI protocol for his application because he doesn’t need snapshot copies and sees slightly higher capacity utilization. Storage is easy to provide over Ethernet—he can slice up or dedicate an entire StoreVault for each IIS server.
Another 14 StoreVault units have also been placed in Los Angeles and are used for replication of photo archives over the WAN from New York. This disaster recovery plan means disk and wire speeds for quick recovery. Replication of photo archives is still managed via MediaVast’s homegrown tools since the archive is not very volatile. However, with growing storage needs, Hugh is considering StoreVault Replication, a significantly faster and more efficient tool.
The StoreVault Advanced Protection Architecture gives Hugh the reliability that is so critical for his work. In the past, a single disk failure occurred far too often and carried an enormous amount of risk. But today, even two concurrent disk failures do not faze Hugh. Regular disk scrubs ensure disk health and the Rapid RAID Rebuild feature provides for proactive suspect disk failure with no rebuild time. An added advantage is StoreVault’s Global Hot Spare feature which can detect a failed drive, or a drive that is about to fail, and automatically start the rebuild process. Now drives rarely go down and even if they do, they are automatically rebuilt with no downtime or human interference. With RAID DP and a global hot spare, he has not lost a single byte of data.
Future plans for MediaVast include adding at least 12 more StoreVault units for video content in Los Angeles, upping their total number of StoreVault units to 40.
Customer Experience
“With my new StoreVaults, I no longer worry 24 hours a day about disk failures,” says Hugh. “I don’t worry about driving 30 minutes to a data center and fixing broken equipment, which used to take at least two hours!”
It is at the most a ten-minute job for Hugh to get a new StoreVault unit up and running. Hugh is relaxed and has stopped worrying about crashes and has preserved operating capital and budget limitations.
Customer Benefits
MediaVast has derived several major benefits from the StoreVault deployments in their data center.
Reliability and availability are no longer issues. Video and image files are both current and archived, presenting endless billable opportunities for MediaVast.
Manageability of the whole storage environment has improved dramatically. No more worrying about individual RAID controllers, firmware revisions, software tools and web-based consoles. If something does go wrong with a drive, StoreVault can automatically send an e-mail alert. More importantly, with StoreVault units in place, things are much less likely to go wrong.
Each unit comes at a compelling price point. Hugh loves the fact that he has not tied up all his dollars in a single large appliance—separate units allow him to grow with his needs. Hugh’s data is now sitting prettier than a Hollywood star on the red carpet.
| Technical Environment | |
| Operating Systems | Windows-only environment |
| Critical Software Deployed | IIS server using StoreVault, FTP servers, Database servers, Exchange server |
| Backup Software | None, disk-based replication is used for disaster recovery |
