EditShare Extends Storage Capabilities For Red Pepper

EditShare has continued its work with Red Pepper Pictures, adding a powerful EFS 450 storage system at the company's Johannesburg headquarters.

The EditShare media storage and management systems are also accessible from Red Pepper's other facility in Cape Town, South Africa.

Red Pepper is a production and post business serving broadcasters, advertisers and corporate clients, in Africa and globally. Focused on creativity, across all their activities the company generates more than 4500 minutes of content each month.

This level of business calls for highly tailored workflows as well as carefully controlled storage and media management. This is particularly true in the case of high profile, fast turnaround reality television like the 'Housewives' reality franchise, 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire', 'Big Brother' and a popular Afrikaans music reality show 'Die Kontrak'. Red Pepper initially invested in EditShare storage in 2013, and has scaled its facilities since then, most recently adding the powerful EFS 450 system, designed for demanding bandwidth applications.

EFS is a software-defined storage ecosystem built on commodity hardware and designed for practical workflows, with the ability to scale from a single storage node to an enterprise cluster, with a single namespace for simple management. The EFS 450 incorporates fault tolerance and very high bandwidth, with intelligent data distribution to ensure the timely support of large numbers of users.

It incorporates EditShare's FLOW media management software with dedicated, redundant metadata servers. The workflow toolset is particularly important when multiple editors need access to content simultaneously, in applications like fast turnaround editing of programs with a very large number of sources.

"We turned to EditShare because we needed something that could manage high throughput, fast turnaround edits," said Christian Nenkov, Head of Post Production Operations at Red Pepper. "We found that it could do the job far better than anything else on the market. Our staff are all comfortable with the EditShare toolkit, and it makes sense to continue to invest in it as our business grows."

Protea is EditShare's partner in South Africa, and provides the sales, installation and support for Red Pepper. "They are a really busy company, with some huge productions on their slate," said James Macpherson of Protea. "FLOW lets them set up customised workflows for complex reality shows, and it is simple to add remote access to and from Lagos and Cape Town. We are pleased to continue this strong relationship with Red Pepper."

"We've seen substantial growth in the region over the past two years thanks to Protea. Their ability to highlight the key end user workflows and requirements so that we can provide the right solution has been critical in the successful deployment of this and many other systems," commented Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare.

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