French Media Firm Adopts Seagate for Data Storage

Centreville Télévision (https://www.centrevilletv.com), founded in 1982 and headquartered in Paris, France, is well-known in the post-production field. With more than 40 years of experience, Centreville Television is a dependable executive production and post-production partner for AV and corporate businesses. The company, part of Groupe Transatlantic Holding (https://www.groupetransatlantic.com), features 60 editing rooms, nine color grading rooms, nine sound studios, and three production sets (green background, webinar, and virtual, which uses Aximmetry and Unreal Engine technology).

Centreville Télévision works with multiple organizations such as France Télévisions, TF1 (Télévision Française 1), and a famous French fashion brand. Their projects can be as varied as documentary production, live TV broadcasting, and opera filming. They also often work with one of their fellow Groupe Transatlantic Holding subsidiaries, Video Digital Multimedia (VDM), a dedicated AV lab that provides a complete range of technical and digital media solutions worldwide. VDM works with multiple media companies including broadcasters, streaming platforms, and other post-production houses and Netflix, serving as a preferred fulfillment partner in the EMEA region. VDM also develops a media asset management (MAM) tool that adapts its historical expertise and offers it as a software-as-a-service product called, mediaspot® (https://mediaspot.io).

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Centreville Télévision is motivated by several principles, including corporate social responsibility, security, and high technical standards. As part of its environmental/social/governance (ESG) strategy, the company focuses on reducing its consumption of electricity. Regarding security, they aim to decentralize their data storage options. In addition, they have set high benchmarks for their technology standards, especially for data storage capacity, performance, and availability.  

Post-production projects require a lot of rush work involving high-capacity footage and images. What used to be high density (HD) is now 4K and can even be 8K for certain special effects. Centreville Télévision’s customer France Télévisions, will use ultra HD (UHD) or 4K, which is poised to be the new AV standard,) for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. The company claims switching from HD to 4K is equivalent to multiplying the size of AV files by four or six, depending on the codec.

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Centreville Télévision aims to meet multiple short- and long-term challenges in the years ahead. Their customers expect them to implement high- quality standards with equally high levels of security and data integrity. With these considerations in mind, the company required a data storage solution that’ is secure, fast, and reliable, while also relatively easy to install and manage. Simultaneously, they needed to be prepared for new broadcast standards, expected in two years, that would profoundly expand both its customers’ and  own data storage needs. 

 Centreville Télévision aimed to demonstrate to its potential new customers and win future contracts that their data storage solution was fault tolerant and able to provide instant access to data. As part of this initiative, the company aimed for fast data storage access within their main office plus backup in a data center located elsewhere within Paris to be linked by a dark fiber connection, (using available wavelengths on the coarse wavelength division multiplexing (CWDM) multiplexer of the dark fiber link.

Accumulating over 1 PB of online storage made the media company reassess their data storage strategy. Initially, adding multiple NAS devices was sufficient. However, the company wanted a solution to alleviate any possible data loss risk, and just adding NAS devices started to become inefficient. A more unified solution would result in improved performance, security, and reliability in a single device. The company would then gain the ability to grow, reply to more contract tenders, and win more projects. With such a solution onboard, Centreville Télévision would be ready for the 4K standard within two years’ time, and even be able to anticipate future demand. 

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Centreville Télévision ultimately decided to adopt Seagate Exos® CORVAULT™ self-healing, high-density data storage. The company’s technology partner, LAFI (https://www1.lafi.fr), helped coordinate the project with a Seagate sales lead, who they consider to be “very responsive and supportive. ”Centreville Télévision was also familiar with Seagate due to their prior use of its internal hard drives. 

The Exos CORVAULT- managed block storage array with utonomic Distributed Allocation Protection Technology (ADAPT) and Autonomous Drive Regeneration (ADR) immediately met the post-production specialist’s requirements, especially regarding security and ease of use. Seagate’s ADAPT next-generation erasure encoding solution replaces traditional RAID (redundant array of independent disks) types with a protection scheme that distributes parity across a large set of high-capacity, self-encrypting hard drives. ADR is a self-correcting system that renews a drive in-situ without the need for a manual drive swap because it’s, able to return most drives to dependable service by reconfiguring the drive to bypass errant components. This technology also helps reduce the environmental impact of computer e-waste as ADR drives are renewed instead of discarded. Centreville Télévision also appreciates Exos CORVAULT’s efficient drive density, low- power consumption, modularity, and redundant active-active controllers, which help  reinforce data protection and minimize overall cost per terabyte. 

The company’s new CORVAULT now lives in their selected remote Paris data center and is connected to their main location via dark fiber, which alleviates concerns over power surges and cuts, and rovides monitored hydrometry (water cycles and quality). Working with video, Centreville Télévision aims for no latency issues, so the dark fiber connection provides virtually no technical limitation for data transfer related to in service, speed, or bandwidth between the data center and main office. ith Seagate CORVAULT, it’s the equivalent of he staff data residing in the same building. As the subsidiary, VDM, is also connected to dark fiber. So, if there’s ever an issue with one connection, the alternate can be used, providing backup connectivity to the remote data center. 

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Centreville Télévision sees multiple benefits in choosing Exos CORVAULT . One improvement has been in server bay space. The single 1.5 PB CORVAULT (5U), with 84 high-capacity hard drives, plus two server gateways (each 2U) replaced 16 existing servers that were taking up 29U’s worth of space and power. The company has realized electricity savings of over a third of what was spent on the previous equipment and appreciates having less individual equipment (three units versus 16 units) to monitor and update (thus saving maintenance time). Centreville Télévision has found CORVAULT provides a better price per terabyte compared to its competitors, in addition to offering them peace of mind when it comes to data volume security.

Installing Exos CORVAULT as their remote data center-located data backup solution gives Centreville Télévision with  the confidence  to position itself on calls for tenders that require a high level of data security. Next steps include setting automated archiving and backup to help save time, as well as adding flash storage to xpand the solution for production related to media ingestion and outward data movement. The company is also considering adding an additional CORVAULT for separate business-level use. When that time comes, Centreville Télévision plans to contact Seagate, as “they will have the solution to our storage need problem”.  

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