Melbourne Football Club Accelerates Video File Distribution

Challenge

With 200+ hours of HD video shot every week, requiring secure, highly available storage, the club needed a solution that wouldn’t exceed mandated league spending limits.

Solution

A combination of Panzura CloudFS NAS and Archive provides enterprise storage, data intelligence, and fast data access, as well as a high level of data protection.

Industry

Sports

Cloud

Melbourne Football Club Stores and Shares Mega-Size Files with Panzura

The Melbourne Football Club is an elite sporting organization with both men’s and women’s football teams in Australia. Video footage of training sessions and games is critical part of their success, but the ever-increasing amount of storage and security required to store them in a way they can be easily accessed by authorized viewers is exceptionally costly.

Challenge: Provide uninterrupted, rapid access to large video recordings

The Melbourne Football Club’s league regularly produces 200+ hours of high-definition video per week as a result of the 20-30 games shot. Additionally, the files can’t be compressed because doing so disturbs the video quality.

MFC also requires a few database applications, including data warehousing for GPS and statistic information, an Athlete Management System, and a CRM for managing customers and members. However, due to a lack of enterprise budget and a highly competitive environment that is subject to league-imposed salary and spending caps, all expenditures are highly scrutinized.

Because of this, the club looked into cheap, inefficient solutions out of desperation, which imposed stress on MFC’s IT department because their data security and access could be compromised in a sub-par environment. If a data restore was ever needed, there was no guarantee that it would work. Eventually, it got to the point where the IT team itself couldn’t tackle the problem at hand.

The major benefits are silent — when IT is humming, people generally don’t mention it. Customer satisfaction in our football department is up!

Solution: Panzura CloudFS

In order to overcome these challenges, MFC knew they needed a solution that could handle the replication to cloud storage, be fast enough to allow for big transfers of their video packages, work effectively with Apple iMacs and MacBook Pros over Server Message Block (SMB) protocols, and enable snapshots of files in the cloud. Working with their technology partner CSG, they discovered Panzura.

Benefits: Simplify data backup, consolidate to cloud and save time

Single Site NAS and CloudFS Archive have provided MFC with a compatible hardware and cloud platform. Since Panzura has been integrated into MFC’s system, there has been a drastic reduction in support requirements, which has saved MFC Support Staff of MFC IT Department a wealth of time.

With Panzura, MFC is able to consolidate and centralize their unstructured data in the cloud, while keeping active data cached and close to users. Previously, the MFC team was never sure if their data was truly backed up and secured, and they struggled with how to manage their backups.

Now, MFC enjoys a cloud model that is simpler, faster, and less expensive than deploying their old primary, backup, and archive storage. MFC also has limitless snapshot options with block-level replication, a critical advancement when dealing with the company’s large video files. They are able to store all the snapshots the company needs in the cloud without impacting performance, and they can quickly restore from a full-file system down to an individual file level.

In short, CloudFS provides MFC with greater peace of mind knowing that they have an enterprise-grade solution in place. With the ability to eliminate backup and archive, as well as manage large data sets on a platform that is compatible with all types of hardware, MFC’s IT department can sleep soundly.