Production company HiT invests in storage solution

HiT Entertainment, producer of animated children's TV programmes including Bob the Builder, Thomas the Tank Engine and Pingu, has deployed Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) storage solution to handle its growing storage needs.

The company said it needed the solution to support the creation of high-resolution imagery for children's TV programmes. Owing to advances in CGI technology, the average size of each image has grown from 20MB to 500+MB.

The company bought two Hitachi Data Systems Adaptable Modular Storage 2100 appliances, as well as associated software and services.

Ryan Turnstall, vice president of global IT operations at HiT Entertainment, explained that HDS satisfied some of the key criteria the firm was looking for from the solution. He said that prior to using HDS' technology, the firm had relied on storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) solutions, but felt that storage technologies had moved on.

"We invited seven or eight vendors to pitch their products to us; our key criteria was around scalability and flexibility around a storage platform, but also simplicity. A lot of vendors have some quite complex solutions that didn't necessarily meet our requirements."

He added that tiered storage – a storage networking method in which data is stored on various types of media – was another key requirement, as was the ability to provide tech support globally, owing to the firm having offices in the US and UK.

"We worked with an independent third party to look at data strategy needs and it identified the importance of tiering to us. It also showed we were using expensive SAN technology that wasn't needed as it was supporting an archive, where we could actually use cheaper disks and reduce costs."