First division club KRC Genk is looking for a new, fast and reliable storage solution tailored to its five-person media department. A FlashStation from Synology can replace the existing infrastructure at an interesting price-performance ratio.
Where do you store terabytes of media files at resolutions up to 8K so they can be quickly found and edited by a team of media professionals? KRC Genk’s IT team has long entrusted this task to an oversized NAS, but after years of faithful service, an upgrade is now in order. In addition, the media department of the first division soccer team has grown to a five-person team in recent years. A powerful solution is in order.
Jeroen Jaekers works as Business Unit Manager ICT at KRC Genk through Tracs Systems. “The football club is an atypical customer,” he explains. “About a hundred people work here during the week, but every two weeks the IT infrastructure has to support more than 20,000 people.” IT is a broad concept. Of course, connectivity in the stadium is just as important as the smooth operation of the ticket offices and ticketing system.
8K video
The club’s media department is taking care of the whole thing. Professionals work there to provide the KRC Genk’s digital channels with relevant videos. “You have a lot of pictures,” explains Jaekers. “These come from both TV broadcasts and our own recordings. 4K and now even 8K videos are no longer an exception. More than ten terabytes of video data are added every year.”
“The department initially worked with a robust NAS, which was expanded over the years,” he continues. “The people in the media department work with the videos on their Mac. You need direct access to the data, so it must be local. Additionally, fast flash drives and a fast connection are essential for video editing.”
Flash and 10GbE
Nowadays, the NAS is not only old but also inadequate. “We were therefore looking for a large capacity flash solution with 10 GbE,” explains Jaekers. Looking for a solution, he turned to ITdaily and Synology’s opportunity to test a rack-mounted FlashStation FS3600.
The Synology FS3410 is a full-flash product with space for 24 SSDs. The device is equipped with a powerful eight-core Intel Xeon D-1541 processor and has 16 GB of DDR4 (ECC) memory as standard. The server can handle SATA drives and is expandable up to 72 bays. In addition to four classic 1 GbE ports, there are also the two important 10 GbE RJ45 ports on the back. The device is equipped with a redundant power supply and can outside the bandwidth to get managed.
10 GbE and Flash, future-proof thanks to large capacity, are important assets for KRC Genk. “We needed a professional solution,” Jaekers continues. “But KRC Genk is a football club. The budgets mainly go towards football-related matters. That’s why we looked for a cost-effective solution. Synology’s flash drive is priced more competitively than traditional flash servers.”
In addition, the device has extensive backup options via Active Backup for Business, which can be easily configured via the software. Prior to this test of the Flash server, this functionality was not yet available for KRC Genk.
Simply
Jaekers also finds it useful that Synology also provides the drives itself, so one party is responsible for the entire device. He also liked the user interface. Jaekers hasn’t worked with Synology before, but he and his colleague have Technical Manager Joachim Volders confirms that getting started with the device was easy. Backup functions in the cloud are also conveniently integrated.
The test had a positive impact on KRC Genk’s IT staff. The device ticks all the boxes and is an excellent candidate for monitoring media department needs for years to come.
This article was written by the editorial team as part of a test setup with KRC Genk in collaboration with ITdaily partner Synology.
Source: IT Daily
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