Case study: Jungle IT & Digital Media Services

Advice 2010-08-02 13:23

Jungle IT helps DMS UK manage exceptional data growth with scalable solution from Overland

Digital Media Services (DMS) UK is one of the world’s leading media monitoring and trailer distribution companies in the digital media sector. Focusing on two specialist areas within the digital market, DMS manages vast amounts of data for its clients. It provides cost-effective media monitoring solutions and its Panther product works with 80 percent of the world’s major film studios to provide thousands of film trailers online.

The challenge of rapidly growing data
DMS’ business is based on storing, managing and displaying vast amounts of data for its clients. But it was struggling to manage its data growth. One area that was particularly worrying was its outdated storage solution, which was based on a combination of external hard disk drives, direct attached storage devices and a number of TV recording machines.

Gavin Holmes, IT manager at DMS UK, explains: “Our Panther Digital Trailer division provides film studios with an important global online distribution service. This means storing and managing thousands of film trailers in numerous formats and languages.

“We were managing around 12TB of data, when the division started to discuss an upgrade, which could eventually quadruple our storage needs. With DMS managing such rapidly growing amounts of data, it became clear that our old storage system was going to run out of capacity very quickly, and a new system was essential.”

Solving the issue
Holmes recognised that a network attached storage (NAS) solution would provide data storage services to all of its workstations and servers on the network. It needed a product with enterprise class features, with the ability both to scale to accommodate DMS UK’s storage growth and to guard against the loss of the company’s valuable client data. Eventually he found a solution from its IT solution provider, Jungle IT, which ticked all the boxes.

“The issue for DMS was that it was managing approximately 15 TB of files on LaCie NAS drives, which it had bought and added to as its data volumes had grown. But when it was pressed to consider an upgrade due to reliability issues with the existing hardware files, it decided to step up a gear,” explains Jonathan Asquith, director at Jungle IT. “It turned to us to advise them on the next step. We all agreed that they needed a large NAS data storage system that could grow with them as the amount of data grew.”