DataCore Swarm Empowers NEP CDN and Delivers Exceptional Performance and Reliability

From the Oscars to the Olympics, NEP provides the technology, the people and know-how to enable its clients to produce the world’s biggest live and broadcast events. NEP’s unparalleled worldwide network gives them the largest and deepest pool of outsourced broadcast engineering and production talent in the industry, providing solutions around the globe for Remote and Cloud Production, Studio Production, Video Display, Host Broadcasting, Post-Production Media Asset Management, Video on Demand, Digital Media Services, Playout and Uplink Communication.

NEP’s solutions are developed by award-winning in-house integration teams led by Gerbrand de Ridder, NEP’s Head of R&D and Lead System Architect of NEP, The Netherlands.

The initiatives are supported onsite and in real time by highly trained technical engineers who deliver customized solutions, superior service (24/7) and flawless execution to clients at every stage of the production cycle.

Gerbrand de Ridder’s team designed and deployed NEP’s CDN (Content Distribution Network) in the Netherlands, leveraging a large scale-out object storage platform with DataCore Swarm software.

The CDN back-end is a common use case for object storage but, in this particular case, NEP found a clever way to use object storage as a key element in delivering a great balance between performance and reliability of the system.

After a thorough evaluation process that included several vendors, DataCore Swarm was selected for its infrastructure flexibility and an attractive licensing model. Since the installation, NEP has grown to be an influential partner of DataCore, who listens to needs and feature requests while developing new and innovative file access methods such as SwarmFS and FileFly.

Even though a large part of data accessed at NEP is performed via API, there are still legacy application components that require file-based access – a common scenario across use cases.Swarm also demonstrated its ability to scale not only in capacity but also in performance. NEP has several versions of each piece of content to serve different types of devices and bandwidth.

As a result, the object store has copies of hundreds of thousands of files of varying sizes which, when not cached, must be streamed directly to the end user’s device.

Despite the complexity of streaming content of multiple sizes, Swarm provides impressive throughput, and has continued to improve after implementation of further infrastructure optimizations.

A large Swarm cluster configuration is the key and active component of NEP’s CDN platform. Originally deployed to store all available content, given its durability and reliability – now the least-viewed videos are usually streamed directly from Swarm before being cached on the edge network appliances if demand increases.

With more than 200 nodes from two different hardware vendors, the flexibility and scalability of Swarm object storage, paired with the software-defined approach has allowed NEP to build a platform that is perfectly tailored to its requirements.