C A S E S T U D Y
CNBC
QLogic Switches Give CNBC an
Edge with Improved Production
Time
Challenge
Improve workflow processes and employee productivity
Solution
A primary and backup storage area network (SAN), each with
a QLogic
®
SANbox
®
9000 Fibre Channel Switch, two Apple
®
Xserve
®
servers, and an 18TB Apple Xsan
®
file system; both
SANs are connected via Fibre Channel to an Apple Xserve
server that provides the mirroring function between the two
SANs; 10 Apple Mac
®
Pro workstations
Result
The new high-performance SAN has vastly improved television
production time; CNBC artists are no longer constrained by
slow systems as they do their work, resulting in a 20 percent
increase in their productivity
“As CNBC competes in the world of business news programming, the speed of
production process is essential. QLogic switches have helped us dramatically
increase workflow.”
— Rich Tallmadge
Graphics Engineer, CNBC
CNBC, the cable network of NBC Universal Cable, reaches more than 300 million
viewers in the United States and abroad each day with a lineup of fast-paced business
and financial news programs such as
Morning Call, Squawk Box,
and
Mad Money
.
To compete with other networks, CNBC makes programming compelling by providing
a daily stream of animation, illustrations, and designs that vividly explain the business
world to viewers. But until recently, an outdated storage system created bottlenecks
that slowed down this part of the production by forcing the production staff to wait
hours for servers to finish their work.
Presentation is the key to owning market share in the television industry, and the
CNBC production department makes demanding use of the storage environment to
generate those compelling images. Several high-performance applications are used by
staff, including Autodesk
®
Maya
®
3D modeling and animation software, Zaxwerks
®
3D
Invigorator graphics, and Adobe
®
After Effects
®
software for motion graphics and visual
effects. CNBC artists also use 10 Apple Mac Pro workstations.
Each production staff member used a Mac Pro workstation with local storage and a
4TB Apple Xsan file server for shared files. But the storage system was slow and lacked
sufficient throughput to handle all production workflow. “The slowness hurt employee
productivity as our production staff waited for their projects to be completed,” said Rich
Tallmadge, CNBC’s graphics engineer. “We needed to accomplish much more in less
time. The storage system was the bottleneck.”
QLogic switches selected to provide high bandwidth for SAN
To provide high-speed storage, accessible to all production employees, Tallmadge
decided to adopt a SAN architecture. To ensure continued data availability, he elected to
build two SANs—one as the primary storage environment and another mirrored version
to be used in case of a failure in the primary system.
To support their high-end production applications, the staff needed the SAN to be very
fast. Tallmadge chose QLogic SANbox 9000 Fibre Channel Switches and two Apple
Xsan file systems with 18 terabytes of storage for each SAN. The high bandwidth of the
QLogic switches allows CNBC graphic artists to move the huge files efficiently through
the production process. The Xsan file systems connected the artists directly to the high-
speed Fibre Channel network.
