overview
WildBrain is a Canadian media production, distribution and broadcasting company that makes content for kids and families. Home to such brands as Peanuts, Teletubbies, Strawberry Shortcake, Caillou, Johnny Test and Inspector Gadget, the company has shows seen in more than 150 countries on over 500 telecasters and streaming platforms. Their ad-based video-on-demand business, WildBrain Spark, offers one of the largest networks of kids’ channels on YouTube, with over 200 million subscribers.
The nature of our business requires us to have quick and easy access to any file in our library. We decided that Spectra’s object storage solution would be the ideal medium for our archive, providing high-density storage on spinning disk, giving fast access, but without the cost of traditional NAS systems.
The Challenge
With approximately 13,000 half-hours of filmed entertainment in their library, WildBrain’s expertise in building entertainment brands that have captivated audiences for decades means that it is important for them to efficiently deliver content to clients around the globe. As their media library grew to over one petabyte, WildBrain wanted to ensure that their teams could maintain quick access to content, while controlling production storage sprawl and backup costs. WildBrain went looking for a system that would migrate files automatically from spinning disk to backup and archive repositories, seamlessly expanding capacity in a low-cost Perpetual Tier of storage.
The Solution
Over the course of 10 months, WildBrain deployed two Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage Systems, a Spectra® BlackPearl® Object Storage Disk Solution, a Spectra® Stack® Tape Library and a Spectra NAS Solution. Spectra’s BlackPearl is a modern object storage solution that manages multiple storage targets in a single Perpetual Tier of storage, including object storage disk, tape and cloud. The Spectra solution not only enabled WildBrain to implement archives for multiple digital asset management applications, but also provided them with a robust disaster recovery (DR) strategy that keeps their digital assets protected with multiple copies on multiple mediums, including copies on premise and offsite. The BlackPearl RioBroker interface will enable WildBrain to handle any future migrations quite easily and non-disruptively – be it to newer tape generations, to a different MAM system, or incorporating new storage media into their workflow.
Environment Snapshot
- BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform
- Spectra BlackPearl Object Storage Disk Solution
- Spectra Stack Tape Library with four LTO-8 half-height drives
- Spectra NAS Solution
- BlackPearl RioBroker
- TMD Mediaflex-UMS
