Fox TeleColombia is a television production company headquartered in Bogotá, Colombia. The company has established itself as one of the most important production companies in Latin America in recent years due to the success of scripted, unscripted, documentary and sports content on both cable and broadcast television.

With so many productions in the pipeline at any given time, Fox TeleColombia’s storage system was being pushed past its limits. Not only was the capacity insufficient, but the siloed nature of the storage architecture meant that workloads had to be processed one by one rather than simultaneously, resulting in delays and inefficiencies that decreased productivity. It was clear that the system needed an upgrade.

Working with a forward-looking partner

Media and entertainment clients generally turn to niche solutions to solve storage challenges. These solutions are typically vendor-locked and can be very expensive.

But Fox TeleColombia went to Redsis for a plan of action. Redsis is an IT services provider serving clients in Latin America for more than 20 years, and an IBM Platinum Business Partner with expert certification in server and storage systems. The company has grown its market share by positioning itself as a strategic partner to its clients, rather than as a vendor of storage solutions or installer of hard drives.

In line with this strategic philosophy, Redsis proposed a solution to Fox TeleColombia that would provide more than mere storage capacity—it would demonstrate the benefits of digital transformation by drawing on IBM solutions.

The thinking behind the solution

Traditional storage can’t respond to the complex process of digital transformation. Dependence on on-premises storage environments can be risky and require high IT maintenance. Hybrid cloud deployments let you scale storage as needed and within a budget you can afford, while offering both high availability (also known as data resilience in production environments) while greatly reducing IT overhead on the client side.

What is high availability? Quite simply, it’s a measure of how successful users’ applications are at performing their required tasks that depend on the files in the database—in this case, video clips. Availability measures need to account for unplanned and planned outages, and the costs of ensuring availability versus the company’s bottom-line expense of downtime.

Improving the availability of additional storage space requires an architecture that can leverage the speed of faster processors, as well as databases that intelligently prioritize access to the client’s most important applications when those applications need it. Redsis consulted the video editors at Fox TeleColombia to understand the needs of their video editing applications.

A software-defined storage strategy

Redsis implemented a software-defined storage strategy in a hybrid cloud environment using IBM Spectrum® Scale. IBM Spectrum Scale provides a global data platform for high-performance, next-generation data services.

IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to files from multiple nodes (such as video-editing suites across the country), enabling high-performance access to a common set of data, supporting both high availability and scalability.

The solution was complemented by robust physical storage: IBM FlashSystem 5035 for flash storage and an IBM TS4500 tape library for highly secure backup storage.

This solution allowed Fox TeleColombia to leverage their existing infrastructure while increasing the amount of available hard disk space by 600 TB. This space can be rapidly freed up and reused by sending information from active hard disk space to backup tape storage. The resulting availability of storage space allowed up to 30 production editors to access the data simultaneously.

Expanded capabilities without expanded costs

After the new storage solution was implemented, Fox TeleColombia saw a significant boost in their data processing capability, resulting in a 60% increase in production. Additionally, they increased savings by 40% by avoiding niche brands and working with IBM Business Partner Redsis as their sole vendor.

IBM’s software-defined storage solutions delivers high quality and performance at a lower cost and gives Fox TeleColombia the option to expand as their needs evolve. The proven results of Fox TeleColombia’s solution also opens the door to additional clients in the region for Redsis.

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