Five runs three television channels in total as well as a successful TV-on-demand service called Five Download. To meet the increasing demand for easily accessible digital media content, Five needed a scalable storage and server infrastructure. In addition, Five was launching two new channels at the time when CIO Ken Davis was evaluating storage solutions, making the deployment of a scalable storage infrastructure even more urgent. Due to the “always-on” nature of the media & entertainment industry, Five’s data had to be highly available for viewers to access at any time. From an internal point of view, the company’s data needed to be protected and easy to recover in a disaster recovery situation.

This case study explains how Five managed to solve its problems through the adoption of an enterprise class iSCSI-based SAN solution from EqualLogic, and explains the related business benefits over its existing DAS and NAS setup.