With over 600 entertainment customers worldwide, DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a force to be reckoned with in the video infrastructure market. The storage vendor’s latest high-profile media client is Starz Entertainment, a pay TV giant with more than 56 million subscribers across 150 countries.

Starz deployed DDN’s GRIDScaler parallel file storage platform to power its flagship STARZ and ENCORE networks. The company’s previous platform struggled to meet user demand due to an array of performance problems, including failed encodes, time-consuming transcodes and dropped frames.

DataDirect boasts that GRIDScaler makes it easier for Starz to scale its environment while eliminating bottlenecks and service disruptions. The platform also helped the company reduce its data center footprint by slashing hardware and licensing requirements. Colin McGuire, head of infrastructure services at Starz, explained:

“DDN GRIDScaler is incredibly dense, as we now support primary and DR storage in four racks, compared to the nine racks we had for our legacy system in Englewood alone. This lowers our storage Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) considerably and elevates energy and disk-performance efficiency. Based on our experience, we would have needed at least two more storage administrators to manage that much additional storage capacity and a DR facility as well if we had selected another solution. DDN’s powerful storage solution has exceeded my expectations.”

Earlier this year, DDN marketing head Jeff Denworth stopped by theCube to explain his firm’s role in the Big Data revolution. He discussed the many challenges of scaling Hadoop and shared new details about hScaler, a data-driven appliance that his company unveiled at Strata 2013. The system includes a built-in ETL engine that does away with the I/O errors that plague traditional Hadoop clusters.