Sohonet announced that broadcast advertising pre-clearance specialist, Clearcast, has reduced its backup storage costs by half since it has implemented Sohonet Media Storage to store its encrypted backups offsite.
Clearcast installed its 1 Gbps Sohonet Media Network (SMN) connection and a Sohonet Failover Solution in 2011 to support its existing service offerings and future-proof its network infrastructure. In 2012, the company wanted to push as much of its back-office function into the cloud as possible to save costs and achieve more flexibility. Sohonet Media Storage was implemented in early September to securely store copies of their encrypted data backups offsite.
“As Clearcast’s enterprise data footprint rapidly grew and thus the size of backups, transfer speeds and fast data access become important factors in our choice of Cloud storage provision,” said James Morgan-Yates, CTO, Clearcast. “It made sense to leverage the speed and security benefits of SMN to back-up, replicate and store backup copies of our business data. Sohonet not only has a strong heritage of media expertise and excellent customer support, but crucially it doesn’t charge us for accessing our own data since our bandwidth usage is unlimited and uncontended as part of our SMN service. Since implementing Sohonet Media Storage we have realized significant cost savings of over 50 percent as we were able to ditch our expensive, second data center in Farnborough.”
Sohonet Media Storage was launched earlier this year as an extensible, secure and flexible storage system to provide additional and supplementary storage when local storage has reached critical or maximum use. Developed specifically to meet the short-term project needs of the media and entertainment industry, Sohonet Media Storage provides affordable access to short and long-term archiving, back-up and parking and is a viable option for intermediate storage or as an alternative to LTO or portable discs.
“We were genuinely amazed at how quickly our storage service was set up by Sohonet,” Morgan-Yates said. “Within an hour of our first meeting, we were successfully testing Sohonet Media Storage and realizing the cost and time benefits of transferring and accessing our data in the Cloud, via the SMN. In no time at all, we had gained greater business agility just by automatically replicating our backups offsite overnight, which we could not do before.”
“We are delighted that Sohonet Media Storage has had such a strong impact at Clearcast,” said Damien Carroll, chief operating officer, Sohonet. “Sohonet’s new storage solution has been developed specifically to enable media companies and software providers to access expansive resources cost-effectively.”
Clearcast is currently working on an important project to replace its online clearance system, Adway, with a next-generation copy clearance system, CopyCentral, that will make it even easier to get commercials approved for broadcast. This will be launched in the second quarter of 2014.
Clearcast was founded in 2008 by eight British commercial broadcasters to simplify the process of getting advertising to air. Its primary service is to provide pre-clearance for TV advertising for most broadcasters, ensuring that adverts adhere to The UK Code of Broadcast Advertising.
