ABS Broadcast Boosts Efficiency and Reliability with Synology NAS

ABS were conducting an internal audit, looking at what systems they had in place, what worked and what they needed to improve as part of their 5th Generation system upgrades.

One of the main challenges faced was that the previous storage solution was approaching its end of life. This posed risks to the sustainability of ABS' operations which could have serious ramifications, particularly in terms of synchronisation to the cloud and overall maintenance aspects.  This prompted the team to find a newer solution, which could be integrated to use in the long-term as well as with the necessary support and updates to keep the system relevant.

As they surveyed the NAS Market with the requirements above, the team were keenly aware that the rapid growth in data processed meant that scalability of any solution was going to be critical, to prevent costs from spiralling out of control.

In 2018, Parimal Vekaria had recently joined ABS Broadcast as the new IT broadcast engineer, and therefore became heavily involved in the selection of the new storage alongside ABS' Head of Technology Mukund Patel. Whilst Synology's reputation amongst NAS manufacturers was key in their choice, part of the infrastructure already included some older Synology rackmounts: although used for minor storage projects, they had proved reliable and given Parimal a glimpse into the potential of Synology's DSM operating software. This helped cement the decision to adopt Synology into the core of ABS' infrastructure. 

Since then, ABS has deployed over 35 Synology NAS systems across the business, notably within their ABS Cloud Playout solution, providing fast storage for editing stations, video archiving, sharing over FTP, and video transcoding & streaming. All combined, they handled an impressive 2 Petabytes of storage, in 3 critical areas of their infrastructure. The majority of Synology systems are in the File Delivery and Playout infrastructure and provide the core storage for ABS Cloud playout.

Productivity is predicated on being able to efficiently move these large amounts of data, without hitting bottlenecks. With this in mind, each system must provide at least 10GbE connectivity to match the network's potential.

Parimal has consistently opted for Synology entry-level Enterprise rackmounts, the latest being the RS3621RPxs: a powerful 12-bay rack scalable to 36 bays with expansions. Since 2021, he has complemented the setup with Synology's own range of enterprise drives, which brings benefits in terms of performance and reliability, as well as simplifying management such as hard drive firmware updates, which can be applied directly from the DSM interface in less than a minute, without system downtime.

Using Synology NAS has made it easier for ABS to expand storage when required, which means archiving customer data is made easier and importantly, can be achieved at a lower cost, considering it consists mainly of large video files often exceeding 30GB per file.

Beyond the scalability and robustness of the systems, the DSM operating system also has many features that boost the team's efficiency. One great example is the self-checking and auto email alerts - these significantly reduce the engineering effort required to maintain the systems, which in turn helps IT save time. With Synology units being extremely expandable, this has allowed ABS to easily archive customer content.

The reliability of the system is also appreciated by the team, with most units still in production well past their 5-year warranty and giving ABS peace of mind that they'll be able to rely on.

Overall, the Synology units have proved affordable, and easy to set up and manage. This has allowed all of ABS' needs and requirements to be met with no issues to date!