Cable customers in southwest Florida depend on Bright House Networks Tampa Bay to provide high quality service and the company delivers. In turn, the regional cable company's marketing department relies on shared storage technology from Small Tree to facilitate production and post-production of commercials for cross channel use.
When the marketing department at Bright House began producing its own commercials five years ago, they never expected the sort of production demand they currently face. Today, the production team not only works on 30 second commercials, but also on training and marketing videos. As the production team grew, so too did the need for technology that would provide robust throughput to alleviate bandwidth issues, while allowing multiple editors to access files from any location.
"Over the past five years, we've gone from one Final Cut editing suite to four suites, including an animation station that needs dedicated shared storage for large renders," said Julie Chalhoub, a senior producer in Division Marketing for Bright House Networks Tampa Bay. "Prior to installing the Small Tree system we had duplicate files living on dedicated storage at each workstation. This was extremely inefficient, as we had to go through the process of dragging files to external drives and importing to other systems if we wanted to share files."
Working with Bob Zelin, an independent video engineer with more than 30 years experience, Bright House installed Small Tree's cost-effective GraniteSTOR Ethernet-based technology with its unique OS X networking capabilities supporting multiple Ethernet ports, which tightly integrates with Apple's built in file sharing system. The GraniteSTOR solution incorporates Small Tree's PEG6, a 6-port Ethernet card with the Edge-corE ES4528V, a 28-port Gigabit Ethernet switch certified to work with Small Tree's technology.
GraniteSTOR's attractive price-point was a critical factor in the decision to move forward with the installation, according to Chalhoub. "We were looking for a solution that would maximize our productivity without breaking the bank. We explored other options, some of which may have been more cost-effective up front, but not as reliable. The Small Tree system meets our needs and allows us the flexibility to grow."
Designer of simple-to-install, affordable Mac-based networking and shared storage products, Small Tree is the premier multi-port Ethernet networking technology provider for OS X customers, enabling cost effective Ethernet shared storage technology. For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @smalltreecomm.