Production and post-production
Renewing a post house's storage — and moving it out of the building
The largest storage renewal we have delivered: infrastructure renewed, relocated to a data center and given true disaster recovery — without a single day of production lost.
- Client
- Sphère Média (RMD Services Techniques)
- Industry
- Production and post-production
- Location
- Montreal
- Services
- Infrastructure, media storage and post-production · Support and fleet life extension
- Equipment
- EditShare EFS410 · 60NL disaster-recovery nearline · Dedicated network switches · LTO-9 library · Archiware · Baton QC
- Outcome
- The largest storage renewal we have delivered: infrastructure renewed, relocated to a data center and given true disaster recovery — without a single day of production lost.
The context
Sphère Média is one of Quebec’s largest production companies. Its technical arm, RMD Services Techniques, operates the post-production infrastructure: dozens of edit suites all working on the same EditShare shared storage — a system we have maintained for years.
That system was reaching the end of its life cycle. At the same time, the company wanted to move its critical infrastructure out of its offices and into a data center: better power, better cooling, better physical security.
Two major projects, on the same system, at the same time.
The constraint
Editors work in that storage every day. Every show in production has its media on it, its delivery deadlines, its broadcasters waiting. There is no window where you “close post-production for two weeks for the migration.”
The renewal and the move had to happen while production kept running — with the ability to roll back at every step if anything went wrong.
What we did
We designed the target before touching the fleet: a renewed EFS410 infrastructure, hosted in a data center, with something the old installation never had — true disaster recovery. A recovery nearline, an LTO-9 archiving chain, automated file quality control, and dedicated switches connecting the edit suites to the data center as if the storage were still down the hall.
Renewal and relocation, carried out at once — without stopping post-production.
The migration happened in stages, production by production, with validation at every cutover. The old system stayed live until the new one had proven itself.
The service agreement that follows the project isn’t a formality: we’re the ones who answer, and it’s the same people who did the installation.
The result
The infrastructure is renewed, relocated and redundant. Editors found their projects exactly where they had left them — production didn’t lose a day. And for the first time, a major incident in the building would no longer put the company’s media at risk.
It’s the largest storage renewal we have delivered. It’s also what “fleet life extension” means here: the same partner, from the first server to the data center.