Following the merger between Orbit, based in Bahrain and Showtime, based in Dubai, the combined organisation, “OSN” decided to consolidate their business by moving key parts of their operations from Bahrain to Dubai including all broadcast operations.
However, the existing broadcast IT and storage infrastructure in Dubai needed broadcast installation, upgrade and expansion to cope with the increased number of channels that would now be played out from that site, along with the increasing HD requirement and associated media workflows.
The entire project for OSN was delivered very rapidly to fit in with an aggressive migration of their services from Bahrain to Dubai. Due to the tight timeframe, Diversified prebuilt the racks and wiring looms in their UK factory; this also allowed the complex switch configuration and testing to be carried out in the UK. This pre-build ethos allowed the project to proceed quickly against the prescribed 10-week timeline. Firstly the existing edge switches were swung across to the new redundant Cisco core, Diversified re-configured hosts as required to ensure continuity of service taking into consideration the DNS entries and other critical network parameters. As the project progressed new fibres were laid in to provide a redundant architecture to the edge. Some of the most crucial parts of the migration were carried out during off-peak hours overnight to minimise disruption to the workflow. The final stage of the project was to hook the high end clustered storage solution into the new core switch to open up its contiguous, high performance and high availability storage to the entire workflow.
Diversified deployed a multidiscipline team of around 8 people to deliver this project backed up by the massive resources available in Diversified’s factory in the UK. Diversified Middle East provided key personnel to ensure the continuity of the delivery; a specialist to manage the on-site activities and ensure the quality of the finished product, a project manager to oversee the UK prebuild and UAE delivery and a design expert to produce the solution and ensure the delivered project measured up to the initially calculated throughputs.
The new infrastructure promotes a new era of high-end television production at higher channel counts and a lower price point.
