Spectra Logic Organizes Content of the Australian Open for Tennis Australia

Tennis Australia is the Host Broadcaster for the Australian Open and as part of this year’s event, the provider was seeking a solution to store over 180TB of host broadcast content that is generated during the tournament. After a comprehensive evaluation process, they chose the Spectra Logic Black Pearl solution supplied and installed by Digistor.

“We have an enormous amount of content and needed a permanent, cost-effective, and scalable solution. We knew what we had today and what we would need in the future and wanted to develop a partnership that would grow with our needs,” explained Tennis Australia’s John O’Neil. “Digistor played a major role in the deployment of the Spectra Logic solution, and worked with us to refine the requirements and options, as well as providing the necessary quotes and timelines to enable the purchase to be approved and acquired.”

Tennis Australia’s requirements for the new storage solution were extensive. They needed a solution that guaranteed them reliability, scalability, robustness, connectivity, and came with comprehensive support at the right cost.

“We needed a reliable solution that could cope with a number of challenges, as well as grow with our needs, including the ability to archive content to other storage media and thus removing the need to be adding more spinning disks. We also needed a product that could take 188TB of content in 14 days, the duration of the Australian Open,” he continued. “We have a massive data spike when the Australian Open is in progress and then for the remainder of the year, the storage is used to access content. We needed a product that would work with our existing EVS infrastructure to fully realize that investment. Finally, we wanted to have support and critically, we could get this locally via Digistor and globally via the Spectra Logic team.”

The Spectra Logic solution delivered and installed by Digistor met all of Tennis Australia’s requirements presenting them with a robust storage solution that enabled them to migrate all of their data from their temporary storage solution without any data loss or issues.

“We added extra storage prior to the Australian Open and it just worked. It was seamless addition. The Spectra Logic storage integrated into our EVS infrastructure without any significant work required. The storage is fast and responsive to any media requests,” said O’Neill. “Each Australian Open generates more than 180TB of data made up of approximately 2,100 files. It’s clear to see that we have significantly large files as they are the full record of a tennis match, which can sometimes be many hours in duration. We needed a solution that could handle such large files without issue, which the Spectra Logic has more than done.”

During the Australian Open, everyday content was pushed to the Spectra Logic via an integration into Tennis Australia’s Host Broadcast EVS network. As a guide, in the first four days, there are 64 tennis matches per day and some matches have three versions – Clean, Scored and Virtual. In addition, there are press conferences, match highlights, ultra-slow-mo compilations, full day records of the World Feed coverage and the World Feed highlights program.

“In the past, the push of the content to our storage solution never completed before the bump out of the Host Broadcast operations. This often meant that we did not have a complete copy of all the content generated and needed to wait until the storage used by the Host Broadcast Technical Partner was active again, copies were made to external devices and sent to Tennis Australia. This could take several months,” said O’Neil. “For 2019 Australian Open, we had all the content on the Spectra Logic storage and the end of the tournament. At the beginning of the final day, the Men’s Final, the only content that we didn’t have was the upcoming Men’s Final. This is first time that this has occurred, and as a result we consider the Spectra Logic solution supplied by Digistor to be an outstanding success.”

The Spectra Logic solution supplied by Digistor to Tennis Australia not only improved the organizations’ efficiencies, but it also saved them money. “We have dramatically reduced our costs post-Australian Open with the implementation of Spectra Logic. We had all our content on the Spectra logic and we didn’t need to employ people to copy data post-event or wait for external drives to arrive months after the event,” he said. “We had the full tournament immediately after the final match which has enabled us to generate new content straight away. This is a very welcome and major cost-saving bonus for Tennis Australia.”

“Digistor’s sales and service has been outstanding. They listened to what Tennis Australia was trying to achieve, the need to integrate into existing infrastructure and brought to us a vendor in Spectra Logic who could deliver on our needs and requirements,” concluded O’Neil. “Their support has been outstanding and they are always willing to assist.”