Decoupling Storage and Compute to Scale Latina Televisión's Content Delivery

Broadcast television presents a unique set of challenges to IT specialists. In the last five years, the medium has increasingly embraced on-demand and app-based programming to complement traditional broadcasts, forcing television providers to rethink the infrastructure that stores and delivers their content.

Today’s viewers want instant access to 24/7 broadcasts and archives of previously-aired programming at home and on their mobile devices, and television providers need infrastructure that can store and deliver the content they crave.

Bare-Metal Servers Couldn’t Support a Changing Business Model

As the head of infrastructure at Compañia Latinoamericana de Radiodifusion, I oversee the deployment and management of the information technology that powers our administrative offices and studios, including broadcast television, on-demand archives, and app-based programming. I am also responsible for sourcing the best equipment to meet our evolving technology needs.

I’ve been with the company since 2015, and in 2021, I was charged with replacing the storage and compute at our data center. The goal was secure a platform that will support core business applications, power our administrative systems more efficiently, and reduce our IT spend. But the specificity of our operations limited our choice of vendors, as few suppliers were equally capable of supporting enterprise computing and the broadcast and content delivery applications that power our Latina Televisión service.

Our previous environment from another vendor was based on bare-metal servers that we couldn’t scale as we moved from traditional broadcasting to app-based and on-demand content delivery. There was no guarantee it could run modern, containerized workloads for app-based products, and we couldn’t create virtual machines without purchasing costly VMware licenses as an add-on. It didn’t make sense to spend more money propping up infrastructure that couldn’t support our changing business model, so we needed to find a better alternative. 

Separating Storage and Compute Independently 

Our first instinct was to explore hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This software-based approach virtualizes storage, compute, and networking, consolidating resources. It offers a single intuitive interface through which administrators can easily manage the environment and automate IT processes. It seemed like a great idea, but we immediately encountered a major stumbling block.

Traditional HCI architecture scales storage and compute simultaneously. However, our business case requires us to add space for our ever-expanding archive of on-demand content independently of processors. So in addition to being limited to vendors who could support our broadcast-specific operations, we also needed a solution that would let us scale storage and compute separately.

We found our answer in HPE. They had a stellar combination of HPE ProLiant DL360 servers and HPE Nimble AF40 storage arrays running on HPE Alletra dHCI, a disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI) solution that decouples storage and compute, allowing us to add one or the other, as needed. The ability to scale storage independently would free us to launch new applications to respond to customer needs. And because of the robust performance capabilities of HPE ProLiant servers, we were confident that they could support any workloads or new applications.

Moving to this solution required us to rethink how we deployed and managed our IT infrastructures. HPE Services recommended and implemented the right mix of technology to meet our needs, and then they helped us map and navigate the transition. The team told us that if we didn’t feel comfortable with any of the new infrastructure, we could always go back to an earlier point where the system worked as we needed. That gave us great peace of mind.

Engaging Viewers Where They Are 

We deployed our new infrastructure in June 2021, but we didn’t migrate all our applications to our HPE Alletra dHCI right away. We started with our administrative systems because disruptions to those workloads wouldn’t impact our broadcast or on-demand content.

We spent roughly eight months testing the new environment with our back-office systems and applications to ensure it was robust, reliable, and redundant. Once we were confident it could support everything we needed 24/7/365, we migrated our viewer-facing applications.

Once we had switched about 60% of our systems to HPE Alletra dHCI, we started to see benefits. Decoupling storage and compute yielded the expected savings. More importantly, administering our new system with HPE’s single-pane-of-glass interface and additional support from the HPE Services team meant our staff spent less time on troubleshooting and infrastructure administration. Instead, they could focus on producing new content and engineering new experiences for our viewers.

Since we rolled out HPE technology, we have tripled our compute capacity from two to six HPE ProLiant nodes and added a second HPE Nimble storage array. We expect to add more infrastructure as we expand our programming services, and we are counting on HPE Pointnext and our channel partner Dalet to help us right-size our systems.

Latina Televisión programming is available across Peru in urban and rural areas. We have yet to experience any interruptions, and our HPE support team alerts us to issues with our high-availability infrastructure so we can resolve them before they impact our users. We can spin up virtual machines to power new applications and deliver more content to meet demand without exceeding our budget. 

Engaging Viewers Where They Are

Internal users are extremely satisfied with our new infrastructure, and we’ve seen an improved viewer experience. We perform better on internal audits because of dHCI, which helps ensure compliance and easily supports growth. Our new infrastructure gives us the tools to meet our growth targets and achieve our business goals by creating new content and platforms that will engage our viewers on their terms.

Latina Televisión is the number two television channel in Peru, and Compañia Latinoamericana de Radiodifusion has the biggest HPE Alletra dHCI deployment in the country. We have the power and the capacity to deliver uninterrupted television and digital video to viewers across Peru, extending our reach and growing our audience. HPE has given us the peace of mind of knowing our infrastructure is up to the task.