Studio Hamburg Case Study

Studio Hamburg preserves award-winning cinema and television with Spectra Logic Solution
overview
Founded in 1947, Studio Hamburg is known internationally as a leading provider of cinema and TV productions. Its services cover all areas of the modern film industry, including broadcast/IT projects, studio operations, decoration, post-production, dubbing and the rights and licensing business. The group’s production portfolio reaches across all programming segments, from award winning cinema, documentaries and television films to long-standing series, mini-series, daily soaps and entertaining television variety shows.

The idea was to renew our backup system and integrate the existing media archive into the backup. Spectra’s hardware infrastructure offered the performance we needed at a great value, with good references and strong system partnerships.

Dietmar Schuldt, IT Services Manager, Studio Hamburg

The Challenge

Studio Hamburg has a constant need for large-scale media storage and backup. The organization’s entire workflow is digital, including filming, video editing, cutting, retouching, sound recording, fine tuning, and finalizing the product. A 45-minute TV series can generate several hundred gigabytes of original footage, as well as working copies, editing material, photos and the like. Some of their subsidiaries and production teams had maintained their own backup and archive systems, which typically meant standalone external hard drives or NAS systems. After five years of operating, it was time for the existing storage infrastructure to be adapted.

The Solution

Studio Hamburg adopted the Spectra® BlackPearl® NAS Solution for long-term content preservation. The BlackPearl NAS enables an active archive solution to which files can be migrated off the primary storage to free up space, while providing appropriate access and a performance of over 800 MBps.

In 2020, Studio Hamburg decided to replace their backup solution. They deployed a Spectra® BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform with Object Storage Disk and a Spectra® Stack® Tape Library with LTO-8 drives. They expect that the new system will ingest a total of 1.8PB per year. The solution enhances their data protection strategy with multiple copies of backup data in a Perpetual Tier of storage.

Environment Snapshot

  • BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform with 36 16TB HDDs in NAS Fileshare
  • BlackPearl Object Storage Disk (OSD) Solution (40TB)
  • Spectra Stack Tape Library with LTO-8 Tape Drives
  • Commvault backup software
  • Spectra BlackPearl 4U NAS Solution with two expansion nodes and over 90 16TB HDDs (1.4PB total capacity)
  • Second Spectra BlackPearl 4U NAS Solution with 35 8TB HDDs (280TB total capacity)
  • Integrated data management software
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