F5 helps Mediaset España control operational and capital expenses related to data storage

The project, led by Omega Peripherals, a partner of F5, manages to reduce the time necessary to carry out backups in Mediaset Spain from one day to four hours.

F5 Networks, a company specialized in Application Delivery Networking, has just implemented its ARX file virtualization technology in Mediaset Spain with the aim of controlling data growth in that company's storage environment, reducing backup times and achieving significant cost savings, with an estimated return on investment of 18 months.

The growth of Mediaset España has brought with it a significant challenge in terms of information storage. Thus, the continuous increase in data made it necessary for the company to initiate a project with the dual objective of simplifying its storage architecture and keeping a 35TB volume under control within a mixed NAS environment.

After an exhaustive evaluation of the storage solutions available on the market, capable of offering optimized replication and migration services, and through Omega Peripherals, a leading system integrator in the market, Mediaset España selected the F5 ARX platform for intelligent data management through its storage infrastructure.

The ARX platform is capable of working in mixed environments, with storage solutions from different providers, as if it were a single solution, avoiding any type of impact for the user.

Likewise, it allows corporate storage policies to be maintained in an automated manner, ensuring that inactive data, which is the majority, can be stored in a less expensive way but always remaining accessible.

Faustino Rodríguez, IT Manager at Mediaset Spain, commented that "in addition to managing the aspects related to data growth in the short term, our objective was to create a storage architecture that was simple and flexible. F5 Networks presented the best solution at the best cost and, in addition, already had experience in other projects carried out by the Mediaset group, in which it had to face challenges similar to the ones we have now. The time of our first-level backup has been reduced to four hours, when "Before, it was one day, which represents a significant saving in both management and time."

“As the volume of stored information continues to grow exponentially, organizations and companies are trying to identify the best formulas to more efficiently manage this data, keeping storage-related costs under control,” says David Lumbreras, Channel Director of F5 in Spain and Portugal, “the ARX platform has been specially designed to solve these challenges in complex storage environments.”

According to José Manuel Marentes, systems technician at Mediaset Spain, “one of our biggest fears was the impact that the implementation of the system could cause, since the solution had to be placed between the users and our production NAS system, a fear that was immediately dispelled because its implementation was completely transparent.”

ARX ​​appliances are high-performance intelligent file virtualization systems that significantly simplify storage management and reduce storage costs. ARX ​​systems automate data management tasks and eliminate disruptions associated with storage management operations, achieving improvements in cost, agility and efficiency.