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UFC knocks out video production bottlenecks with Flash storage
1. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Media and Entertainment
UFC knocks out video
production bottlenecks
with Flash storage
Overview
Business challenges
• Fast delivery requirement of massive
amounts of video in hundreds of
derivatives
• Operations affected by heavy
transcoding load
• Constraint on amount of content UFC
can transcode and deliver to its
partners
• Overall production output affected by
disk slowdown
Solution
• Implementing the RamSan-710
delivered a non-disruptive solution
• Deployed into production environment
within a day
Benefits
• Time for transcoding jobs dropped by
up to 70 percent
• Reduced load on disk storage that was
impacting other operations by 40
percent
Ultimate Fighting Championship® is the fastest growing sports
organization in the world and is also one of the industry’s largest
producers of video content.
Along with its live pay-per-view shows that are available to 345 million
homes worldwide, UFC® will produce 350 hours of original content
this year for its broadcast and cable outlets on FOX broadcast networks.
In addition, the UFC is in the process of digitizing its entire 10-year
library of analog videotape content.
The situation
I/O intensive video transcoding
UFC operates a robust video production facility in Las Vegas,
encompassing 1 Petabyte of hard disk capacity and a 2.5 Petabyte
LTO-5 robotic tape library. The system is built on Quantum’s
StorNext® platform, a scale-out file system designed for high-
performance file sharing that is widely-used in the video production
industry, with Telestream transcoding engines to deliver content across
a spectrum of diverse platforms. Due to the massive scale of video
production at UFC, Christy King, Vice President of Digital,
Technology and R&D, said the company built an asset management
system with state-of-the-art capabilities. The entire video workflow is
managed by Level Beyond’s Reach Engine software, an advanced media
management and integration platform that enables UFC to ingest, edit,
manage, archive and deliver premium digital media anywhere with
unprecedented efficiency.
2. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Media and Entertainment
“The RamSan has just
completely eliminated
[bottlenecks].Every-
thing’s flowing smoothly.”
—Mike Saindon
Production Engineer
UFC
UFC provides digital content for 130 platforms worldwide, including
Hulu, iTunes, Xbox, PlayStation and Samsung TVs, in addition to its
own web and mobile consumer-facing platforms. Service level
agreements with some of those partners require UFC to edit content
and deliver it, typically within hours of the live event.
“Quick turnaround is absolutely critical,” said Danny Gold, Vice
President, Strategy and Solutions at Levels Beyond. “UFC has extreme
requirements on how fast they have to deliver massive amounts of video
in hundreds of derivatives as soon as it comes in the door.”
To make the video content compatible with the variety of platforms,
every piece of content must be transcoded. Video transcoding allows
content created in one format to be playable on a different format. The
process is crucial to UFC, which provides content in over 100 unique
final formats and resolutions, for everything from big-screen TVs to
tablets and smart phones. Video transcoding is a write-intensive process
that can choke even the most robust hard disk arrays.
The challenge
Accelerate video production without rearchitecting
the environment
UFC discovered that while the Reach Engine asset management system
was capable of handling the huge transcoding load, its backend SAN
storage was not. The impact of the heavy transcoding load was taking a
toll on UFC’s operations. The massive volume of transcoding high-
resolution video imposed an IOPS load that the UFC disk storage
arrays could not support. Even high-end disk arrays can fall short of the
demands of frame-by-frame transcoding workloads where the disk
heads simply are not physically fast enough to keep up. This is an
inherent bottleneck with all rotating hard disk drives that cannot be
overcome even by adding more drives to the array. The fundamental
performance limitations of HDD technology degraded the video
production operations on two fronts: the company was constrained in
the amount of content it could transcode and deliver to its partners, and
the disk slowdown caused by transcoding demands in turn slowed down
all other editing projects, limiting the overall production output.
3. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Media and Entertainment
“Within a day we were
able to get it running in a
production environment
without a huge change in
the infrastructure.There
was nothing we had to
change in code or
workflow.We just pointed
all the transcoders to the
new StorNext volume on
the RamSan instead of
volumes on the spinning
disk arrays.The fact that
it played so nicely with
StorNext was a huge
benefit.”
—Danny Gold
Vice President, Strategy and Solutions
Levels Beyond
“We were quickly hitting the roadblock with the spinning disk that the
volume of transcodes was bringing down the storage,” said Gold.
“Their editors weren’t happy because they were dropping frames as the
disk would take such a huge hit when transcoding multiple jobs. UFC
was having to limp long and really throttle the number of transcodes
and throttle the number of deliveries which isn’t good for business.”
“We’re a sports promotion company, and what we do is sell the next
live event,” said King.
“So if I can’t get this video out of here and deliver it to my television
partners in a super timely manner then that just slows down the entire
marketing process.”
The challenge in finding a solution to the disk performance problem
was complicated by the need to come up with an alternative that would
fit into the existing environment without disrupting the whole
workflow rather than a rip-and-replace solution that required a
re-architecture of the entire system.
The solution
High-performance RamSan-710 Flash Storage
A colleague referred Gold to Texas Memory Systems, an IBM®
Company and UFC quickly installed a RamSan-710 unit to evaluate.
The RamSan-710 is a 1U system with 5 TB of SLC Flash storage that
delivers 400,000 IOPS read and write performance. To get equivalent
performance would require more than 2,200 15-K disk drives with all
of the associated power, cooling and floorspace costs.
The RamSan-710 met all of UFC’s initial requirements: a non-
disruptive solution that offloaded the heavy lifting from the disk arrays
and dropped right into the existing 8 Gb Fibre Channel SAN
infrastructure with no change required to the workflow.
4. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Media and Entertainment
Solution component
Hardware
• RamSan-710 flash storage system
“Within a day we were able to get it running in a production
environment without a huge change in the infrastructure,” said Gold.
“There was nothing we had to change in code or workflow. We just
pointed all the transcoders to the new StorNext volume on the RamSan
instead of volumes on the spinning disk arrays. The fact that it played
so nicely with StorNext was a huge benefit.”
The result
Reduction in processing time by 70 percent
After the simple setup, UFC saw the time required for transcoding jobs
immediately drop by up to 70 percent, with an across-the-board
reduction of 40 percent for every one of the thousands of files
processed for delivery to partners.
Just as important, said Gold, was that the improved performance with
the RamSan also took the load off the disk storage that was impacting
other operations.
“It’s not just that we needed to get these things through faster—which
we did—but we needed to get them through without affecting the rest
of the network. So even if the speed was the same, that would have been
a huge benefit. With the RamSan we gained both benefits.”
“The biggest difference I see is no bottlenecks,” said Mike Saindon,
UFC’s production engineer. “That’s the problem we were running into
before. We were having a handful of editors kickoff encoding exports
and it would slow the entire system down to the point of not moving at
all. The RamSan has just completely eliminated that. Everything’s
flowing smoothly.”
“Before we put the RamSan in we couldn’t use our asset management
system to its maximum capacity and intent,” said King. “The RamSan
makes it so we can push a couple thousand requests at a time for
specific encoding jobs and handles it just fine. Everything gets in the
queue and life is good.”
5. Case Study
IBM Systems and Technology Group Media and Entertainment
King said that the current system should sustain UFC’s growth for the
next 12 - 18 months. At that point she expects to add the equivalent of
8 - 10 encoding machines to handle UFC’s increased production
workload. “We’ll be processing orders of magnitude more content and
it appears that RamSans will continue to be the best processing solution
for speed and flexibility.”
Levels Beyond is now exploring other opportunities for the RamSan-
enhanced Reach Engine production platform, presenting prospective
customers with a drop-in solution that leverages the capabilities of solid
state-based Tier0 storage for high-volume, IOPS-intensive video
workflows. Gold says that state-of-the art Reach Engine content
production and delivery platform combined with RamSan solid state
storage to mitigate the storage-busting effects of high volume
transcoding in a solution that seamlessly integrates into the industry-
standard StorNext environment presents a compelling value
proposition for enterprise video production users.