BEAM.TV is the world’s leading digital advertising distribution network. The company enables advertisers to efficiently distribute digital marketing information internally and share advertising content with broadcasters. It saves agencies, global networks, production companies and advertisers time and money by eliminating the need for videotapes and shipping, thus streamlining the management and distribution of marketing material.

In fact, BEAM.TV helped pioneer the digital asset management industry and has since become the world’s leading choice for online distribution, archiving and delivery. A sister company of Oscar winning visual effects company The Mill, BEAM.TV was established in 2000. It currently has 14 international offices and more than 150 partners worldwide, and counts global brands Coca Cola, Unilever and L’Oréal among its customers.

The Challenge: Improving the Atlantic Crossing

BEAM.TV’s primary data storage facility is in London. However, with its U.S. business arm growing steadily, the company recognised that it needed to localise its service out of an East Coast datacenter to better serve the local customer base.

With two datacenter locations–London and New York–BEAM.TV began distributing digital content across its own network to customers, partners and broadcasters on both sides of the Atlantic. Content must be approved by multiple agencies, executives and creative teams, so the ability to distribute it quickly would not only speed up content production, but also mean that BEAM.TV’s service was a key element in controlling project workflow.

As the content is made up of bandwidth-intensive video, audio and image files, BEAM.TV needed to be able to transfer data between locations more quickly to ensure projects would meet their deadlines and content could be approved for broadcast as quickly as possible. With even short clips regularly exceeding 50MB in size, and broadcast-quality files reaching several gigabytes, this content was putting a huge strain on the network.

“The team pioneered the idea of uploading material via the Internet as a means of speeding up the approval process,” said James Stewart, systems manager at BEAM.TV. “Our initial customer base was primarily in the UK and continental Europe, and as such, serving BEAM.TV out of London was ideal. But as the company grew, particularly in the U.S., we needed to improve the experience for those using BEAM.TV from across the Atlantic and around the world.

“As so many network providers have facilities in New York, it was chosen as the ideal location for our first remote site,” he added. “We purchased space in a co-located datacenter with a 50 Mbps private link back to our primary facility in London. This worked, but only to an extent. The latency on the trans-Atlantic link and the overheads of TCP/IP meant that file transfer speeds between sites were limited to around 10 Mbps.”

Implementing Citrix WANScaler to Accelerate Delivery

Stewart and the team looked at a range of possible solutions for file transfer optimisation. “Our main consideration was that the units would accelerate traffic and cache data in the manner that was promised,” he said. “We tested competitors’ units and found that while basic caching functioned as described, initial data transfers were hardly accelerated, if at all. The WANScaler technology, however, worked even better than expected and required only minimal configuration.

“Using the WANScaler units we found that we were able to transfer data at our private link’s full 50 Mbps capacity. In addition, the 8800’s large memory and disk cache reduced the re-transmission of data to almost zero. Once we’d proven Citrix WANScaler in these real-world tests, we were able to simplify the design of our solution. The large cache would store enough data to remove the need for a separate caching server, and as the WANScaler cache operated at the network level, we were able to remove the extra layer of authentication that a separate cache would require.”

Stewart added: “The final system that we deployed operated very efficiently and in a relatively small footprint, whilst remaining both cost-effective and low maintenance.”

With the opening of the new facility, the North and South American BEAM.TV users are now redirected to its New York servers–traffic that would have previously been directed to the UK. The geographical distance between the U.S. and UK and the associated latency meant it used to take much longer for files to be uploaded and downloaded.

File Transfers Reach Top Speed

Thanks to its AutoOptimizer engine, Citrix® WANScaler™ has improved the speed of file transfers between the London and New York datacenters from 10 Mbps to 50 Mbps. “We’re now only limited by our license and bandwidth,” said Stewart. “I don’t doubt that the WANScaler units would be capable of accelerating much further given a higher-capacity connection.”

But more than just improving WAN performance, the implementation of WANScaler has brought competitive advantage, commercial growth and business security to the company.

“To remain competitive in our space, we needed to be able to effectively service a global client base with the same levels of service wherever our customers are,” said Stewart. “Using WANScaler enables us to provide a faster and more reliable service, and hence gives us an immediate advantage over our competitors.”

He added: “Our experience with our first co-location and the ease of implementation of the WANScaler solution mean that we will be able to expand into other locales with minimal investments of both time and money. Eliminating network performance as a concern will greatly ease our expansion into the West Coast of the U.S. and Asia.”

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