The SABC has acquired software to manage the ingest, production, editing and play-out of sound bytes for all its public service radio services nationally, all hosted on the HP hardware platform, provided by Datacentrix, a local empowered IT solutions and services company.
Some of the biggest benefits made possible by this huge capital investment include the massive improvements in servicing the SABC Public Service Radio with a huge and stable infrastructure on which `on-air` presenters, journalists, news editors and production staff all interact.
The level of hardware reliability was one of the key considerations in choosing the HP hardware.
"In 1996, when it became clear that the `reel-to-reel` tape machines used in studio were reaching end-of-life and tape media was becoming not only increasingly expensive but also more difficult to source, the SABC opted to go the digital route," explains Theuns Nel, Manager of RBF Digital at the SABC.
The initial systems were installed between 1998 and 2000. Usage increased and the ageing equipment and high demands resulted in systems being pushed to the limits with some unwanted results. "This meant that we needed to upgrade our existing hardware infrastructure as it was becoming both too slow and limited for our new requirements.
"Each site is linked to the wide area network (WAN) but must also be able to operate independently in order to be available 24-hours-a-day," he adds.
"This requirement makes it absolutely imperative that the hardware, software and local area network (LAN) be integrated in the best way possible. Of the nine locations, Johannesburg is the largest, supporting four radio stations - RSG (Radio Sonder Grense), SAFM, Channel Africa and Radio 2000 - and a large central news office, on a single HP cluster."
Datacentrix provided HP ProLiant ML 350 Generation 4 (G4) servers, as well as an HP StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) 1500 SAN solution with an average of one terabyte of storage SCSI attached RAID.
Says Nel: "We installed two application servers on each site. They are utilised for back-ups and other applications like the auto-ingest of remote files, where a journalist out in the field works on a laptop, recording and editing a story, which is then converted to MP3 format and transferred to an FTP site. Next, it is automatically picked up and converted to a broadcast standard format and put into the database."
The number of files generated by the organisation per region per month is growing - Johannesburg increased by 45 000 files over the months of May and June, Polokwane by 23 000 per month and Durban by 12 000 per month. "The Johannesburg cluster encompasses two databases - operational and user archiving. We try to keep the operational database as small as possible, a critical performance factor, limiting the size of each user`s private storage but building additional capacity into the archiving side."
According to Ricky Naidoo, account manager at Datacentrix, the fourth generation ProLiant ML350 recommended by Datacentrix was the ideal server for the SABC, as it is designed for growing businesses running core applications and with branch offices and remote sites.
"We also opted for the StorageWorks MSA 1500, a Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN), which could provide an organisation like the SABC with a flexible low-cost, high capacity storage solution that forms the hardware foundation for future solutions to ensure maximum investment protection," he adds.
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