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SWITCHing channels

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 7, Issue 7 - October 2007

CNBC makes programming compelling by providing a daily stream of animation, illustrations and designs that vividly explain the business world to viewers. Now it has a compelling storage solution to go with that winning strategy

CNBC, the cable network of NBC Universal Cable, reaches more than 300 million viewers in the United States and abroad each day with a lineup of fast-paced business and financial news programmes such as 'Morning Call', 'Squawk Box' and 'Mad Money'.

To compete with other networks, CNBC makes programming compelling by providing a daily stream of animation, illustrations and designs that vividly explain the business world to viewers.

However, until recently an outdated storage system created bottlenecks that slowed down this part of the production by forcing the production staff to wait hours for servers to finish their work.

Presentation is the key to owning market share in the television industry and the CNBC production department makes demanding use of the storage environment to generate those images. Staff use several high-performance applications. These include Autodesk Maya 3D modelling and animation software, Zaxwerks 3D Invigorator graphics, as well as Adobe After Effects software for motion graphics and visual effects. CNBC artists also use 10 Apple Mac Pro workstations.

Each production staff member used a Mac Pro workstation, with local storage and a 4TB Apple Xsan file server for shared files. But the storage system was slow and lacked sufficient throughput to handle all production workflow. "The slowness hurt employee productivity as our production staff waited for their projects to be completed," comments Rich Tallmadge, CNBC's engineer in charge of technical operations. "We needed to accomplish much more in less time. The storage system was the bottleneck."

To provide high-speed storage accessible to all production employees, Tallmadge decided to adopt a SAN architecture. To ensure continued data availability, he elected to build two SANs - one as the primary storage environment and another, mirrored, version to be used in case of a failure in the primary system.

To support their high-end production applications, the staff needed the SAN to be very fast. Tallmadge chose QLogic SANbox 9000 Fibre Channel Switches for each SAN. The high bandwidth of the QLogic switches allows CNBC graphic artists to move the huge files efficiently through the production process.

The cost of the QLogic switch factored in to the selection process, according to Tallmadge. "At a third of the cost of director-class switches, but with all the power we need, the SANbox 9000 made our decision easy," he states.

"QLogic's reputation in networked storage, the high performance assured by its switches and its industry relationships made it an easy choice," he adds. "QLogic understands our business and what we wanted to accomplish. Plus the QLogic SAN Architects worked closely with their partners at TekServe to architect a solution and provide deployment assistance. The three teams working together really simplified the project."

Installation by QLogic partner TekServe was non-disruptive. "TekServe has worked with us before and knew our operation, so the deployment was able to move along as planned."

According to Tallmadge, management of the SAN requires little staff time. The QLogic Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007 management tools provide SAN-wide control, including setup, configuration, zoning, fabric management, fabric monitoring and SAN performance monitoring. Enterprise Fabric Suite 2007 can manage an unlimited number of switches and fabrics from a single console.

Due to the large capacity of the SAN, all files are kept in a shared, central location for quick access. "The SAN makes it easy to see all versions of the work and the staff can immediately tell which version is most recent," says Tallmadge. "Before we installed the SAN, there were different versions of files on various Macs and we had trouble keeping track of revisions."

A QLogic SANbox 9000 Fibre Channel switch forms the backbone of a primary and secondary SAN within the CNBC production department. Fibre Channel connections between the Apple Xserve servers, the Xsan file systems and the 10 Mac Pro workstations provide high-performance storage access to boost staff productivity.

With the primary SAN in place, CNBC production staff have seen a 20% improvement in productivity. "With this SAN, our staff can complete their time-sensitive work without long delays. It helped streamline our workflow and has given us the ability to produce more content in less time."

The QLogic switches give CNBC the flexibility to accommodate future needs. With capacity for up to 128 non-blocking ports in a single chassis, the QLogic switches have plenty of room for growth. Any mix of 4Gbps and 10Gbps Fibre Channel blades can be used to connect servers and workstations.

The modular design of the QLogic switch can reduce storage costs and offer cost-effective scalability by allowing other less expensive blade options, such as QLogic iSCSI Intelligent Storage Router I/O blades, for applications that require less bandwidth than high-definition graphics software. "We wanted something that would allow for future scalability and the SanBox 9000 gives us that option," adds Tallmadge.

With the QLogic switches, the network can significantly improve its competitive position. "The QLogic switches have allowed our production department to increase its output substantially by eliminating the time spent waiting for the old systems,” he concludes. ST