“With Scality RING we believe that we will be able to deploy more storage capacity, in a shorter time frame. This allows us to introduce new products and features to the market sooner”

André Knegt Head of Infrastructure at RTL interactive

Scality RING enables 1 billion views a year at VOD provider RTL interactive.

Revamped with Scality

Based in Cologne, Germany, RTL NOW delivers more than 1.19 billion video views annually. Mediengruppe RTL Deutschland experienced tremendous growth in its VOD business and needed a way to scale beyond traditional storage solutions, looking to Scality for a much-needed revamp.

Seeking: massive scale and performance

RTL needed to scale storage for their VOD service easily, quickly, cost-effectively and reliably. Within 18 months following initial installation in 2014, the storage solution managed approximately 22,000 movies and television series, and 16,000 hours of video. RTL interactive continues to grow its Scality RING and add data.

In addition to scalability, other key requirements included:

• Extraordinary performance
• Exceptional data resilience and disaster recovery provisions
• Efficient handling of very large files
• Multiple file access methods

Why Scality was chosen

Based on a successful Proof of Concept prototype and the experiences of other storage teams within the RTL Group, the infrastructure team determined that Scality RING provided the best fit.

• Scalability: Scality RING easily scaled, successfully handling large numbers of files, including very large files.
• Resilience: Scality RING never lost data when system failures occurred at disc, server or network levels.
• Compatibility: Scality RING proved compatible with a range of existing applications.
• Performance: Even at very large scale, Scality RING was able to maintain the necessary IOPS for customer needs.
• Cost efficiency: Scality RING works on any x86 platform, letting RTL interactive choose the best hardware vendor to meet their needs.

Scality RING supports the storage powering VOD services for six television channels, all with growing numbers of viewers, with an expected annual capacity growth of 300%. Storage capacity is expanding rapidly as both the number and size of files increases and the number of viewers and individual video views also continues to grow.