Leading sports production specialist Aurora Media Worldwide has placed GB Labs storage solutions at the heart of its live production workflows for four flagship motorsport events, including Goodwood's 2021 Festival of Speed and Revival, Formula E, and the inaugural Extreme E season.

Live sports production is one of the most fast-paced environments with zero room for error - and motor sports takes the speed and the pressure for rapid turnaround of content to the next level. Aurora Media Worldwide (AMW) develops, produces, and distributes original content and programming for international rights holders, broadcasters, and brands. Clients include BBC, ITV, CNN, Eurosport and Sky, as well as businesses such as Jaguar, Audi and BMW.

With a reputation for an innovative, world-beating service, and some of the biggest names in sports on its client roster, it is critical for AMW to maintain the highest possible standards across its production workflows. Every piece of technology the company invests in must deliver best-in-class performance and reliability.

EXPANDING INTO SPACE
AMW first deployed GB Labs' FastNAS platform alongside the latest GB Labs SPACE intelligent storage system for the 2015/2016 season, when it invested in a Midi SPACE 3RU - providing 32TB of storage capacity - along with an additional SPACE system, to create a mobile storage system for centralised ingest, as well as an editing and broadcasting facility. The solutions have formed the beating heart of the company's live production workflows ever since.

SPACE packs a punch in a small footprint, supporting the highest resolutions and providing fast, efficient data transfers across 1Gb, 10Gb, 25Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb connections. Along with easy installation, maintenance, and upgrades, the solution offers IP connectivity to ensure remote dial-in support.

With the approach of the 2020/2021 season, AMW needed to ramp up its capability. The SPACE system was extended and then upgraded to the powerful HYPERSPACE intelligent storage system - offering a massive 60TB of storage - in 2019, allowing AMW to ensure greater capability and disk capacity in preparation for the 2020/2021 Formula E season.

PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY
AMW already had a GB Labs FastNAS as part of its workflow, but with a growing need to push more content out to more platforms, the system was working to capacity. Based on its robust and reliable performance, AMW invested in a second dedicated FastNAS specifically for the 2021 Goodwood Festival of Speed on 8 - 11 July and the Revival in August, to help support the sheer scale of the live hours per day that the event requires. FastNAS, which gives the AMW production team a highly cost-effective way to leverage huge performance and capacity, also played a significant role during live production of the 2021 Extreme E and Formula E seasons.

Storage and workflow solutions specialists ccktech have been integral to the supply and installation for all these projects, representing the continuation of a long-established partnership between AMW, ccktech and GB Labs spanning four years.

"Through our long relationships with GB Labs and ccktech, we are confident that they can meet all our needs, from performance and robustness to reliability," said Lee Flay, Technical Director at Aurora Media Worldwide. "GB Labs gives us the ability to support all our post production, media management and critical media transport requirements in the field, and we can achieve this with a very compact footprint. Everything fits into a single flight case, which means less equipment to transport and a lower carbon footprint, which ties in nicely with the growing environmental consciousness of our industry and events like Extreme E."

During a live race event, AMW now deploys two identical SPACE units at the track-side, housed in the bespoke "POD" based OB facility created for easy transport to venues, with one acting as a fully redundant backup for the other. The FastNAS storage platform supports Extreme E's remote production workflows, ensuring rapid transfer of data - including 4K and 8K files - for editing and archiving.

A NO-BRAINER FOR RELIABILITY
With its strong ethos of empowering creative workflows, GB Labs' solutions are designed to accelerate media workflows. For a company such as AMW, which operates high pressure, ultra-fast turnaround live production environments and has a reputation for creating some of the world's most compelling content, GB Labs storage is a must have.

Dan Deadman, Head of Solutions at ccktech, explains "We've been asked by Aurora to provide shared storage solutions both for on-location and in-house needs on many occasions and we just keep going back to GB Labs. Their ease of use and configuration for editors and tech admins alike make it a no-brainer for reliability in a high-intensity environment that the fast-turnaround world of Aurora's production demands."

More info: www.gblabs.com