Seagate part of Olympic storage ‘gold’

Not only will there be more coverage when this summer’s Beijing Olympics is held in August, there’ll be lots and lots of video data and it seems Seagate’s got it well in hand.

The storage vendor will provide nearly half a million gigs of storage for NBC, which is televising the event.

NBC has pulled in the vendor’s Barracuda ES for storing data off NBC’s Omneon MediaDeck media series and MediaGrid actie storage systems.

The server and storage system will support 3,600 hours of coverage — three times as much footage taken during the Athen games in 2004.

A press release offered up a unique look into what the system can do:

* A gymnast leaps onto the balance beam. By the time she dismounts, NBC’s broadcast footage is stored on the Barracuda drive in the active storage system, traveled 6,350 miles to the New York MediaGrid active storage system, processed, and transmitted as compelling coverage on television and http://www.nbcolympics.com.*

Phew. I don’t think I’ll ever watch competitive gymnastics in the same light again.

According to Seagate, NBC is using 20 MediaDeck servers, powered by the Barracuda drives, to digitize and ingest HD feeds.

The files are actively transferred, while being recorded, to the MediaGrid system.

Then, using Omneon’s ProCast CDN content distribution system, the proxies are transferred thousands of miles from the MediaGrid active storage system in Beijing to a second MediaGrid storage system in New York, again powered by Seagate Barracuda drives, where producers can browse, view, and edit the files.