Vijender Nagi, News 24's CTO, regards DDP's Active/Active storage as a game changer in transforming media workflows in terms of speed, efficiency, and cost.
Vijender Nagi, CTO of News 24/BAG Films, highlights the critical role of storage in media operations, praising DDP’s next-generation Active/Active storage system for its speed, efficiency, and compact design. The new solution eliminates performance drops, optimizes rack space, and enhances workflows with unique features like Folder Volumes, solidifying DDP as a cornerstone of their infrastructure.
Q: What is News 24 and what do you do?
A: News 24 is part of the BAG Network and one of India’s leading 24x7 national news channels. We focus on delivering credible, fast, and engaging news to viewers across India. The group has around xxx employees, covering not just broadcasting but also production and media services.
Q: What is the biggest challenge in your organization?
A: As CTO, I would say the biggest challenges are on the technical side — network management, security, and of course, storage.
Q: Why storage?
A: Well, we have multiple ingest and recording channels, video editors, playout systems, and archival systems. But what happens if storage doesn’t work? Nothing works — because storage is the main hub where all these systems connect.
We were fortunate that for the past 8 years we relied on a DDP Ethernet-based SAN shared storage system, which provided us with a very fast and reliable solution. However, technology evolves quickly, and after 8 years we decided it was time to replace it with an even better system.
The previous DDP solution was Active/Passive, meaning there was always a slight delay when one controller took over from another. On a few occasions, that was a challenge for our engineering team.
Q: So what storage do you use now?
A: We searched for high-availability storage and considered several companies, mainly NAS vendors. The problem we found was that many of them required separate metadata controllers and used 3 or 4 nodes.
If you add a new node for capacity, the data must be redistributed across all nodes, which slows down the system and causes a temporary performance drop. Also, if you have 4 nodes and one fails, performance immediately drops by 25%. Each node has its own controller, storage, CPU, and so on, which makes them expensive.
Q: And what was the solution?
A: While looking for a true Active/Active solution, we were approached by the DDP team and Elvin Jasarevic, who introduced us to their next generation of High Availability storage.
Q: What makes it different?
A: First of all, metadata and its backup are housed in a single 1U chassis, while storage resides in a single 4U or 5U chassis depending on the capacity required — but with dual Active/Active controllers.
This means that if we want 400TB of storage, with DDP everything fits into just 5U of rack space. Not only does the system have zero frame loss during controller failover, but when you add more storage, the new space is available immediately — no redistribution required. No other storage vendor offers this.
Another unique feature is DDP’s Folder Volumes. We can create individual volumes for each project and apply SSD caching, which is possible because DDP uses its own A/V FS file system designed specifically for Media & Entertainment.
For us, it was only natural to invest in DDP again — the new system is faster than any comparable NAS storage, uses 50% less rack space, is more energy-efficient, and is more cost-effective since DDP does not charge for SAN licenses.
Q: Any final words?
A: We highly recommend DDP storage. Over the years it has proven to be the most critical component of our technical infrastructure, while also being the most cost-efficient. Their support is rarely needed, but when it is, Elvin and his team are always on point.