Revelation Films

Revelation Films

Revelation Films is a BAFTA-nominated production company with a track record of creating quality television programming. Starting in the early-90s, Revelation Films introduced the nation to Lily Savage in Lily Savage: Paying The Rent, catapulting Paul O’Grady and his alter ego Lily to national treasure status. More recently the company has produced high-quality true-crime documentaries: the critically acclaimed Gangsters: Faces of The Underworld for Discovery and the hugely successful The Real Manhunter for Sky Crime, a second series of which is currently in production.

Brief

Revelation’s old office in north west London was running Windows Server 2003 on a desktop workstation. This server handled identity and permissions via Active Directory, and was also their Exchange mail server and file server. Backups were taken on-site to an external disk. There was no off-site backup.

The office was home to fewer than a dozen staff, and while this IT setup had been adequate for a while, the demands of changing technology were beginning to catch up.

Revelation Films needed a modern IT solution that could handle large video files across a network that was secure, robust and scalable, but with an eye on cost.

Plan IT Support’s services

At the beginning, back in 2010, our first recommendation was to replace their current server-on-a-desktop with a machine that was designed for the task, and that would last them for a good few years. A new Dell tower server with Windows Small Business Server 2011 was installed, including Exchange server for email.

This new server was configured on a RAID disk array to protect the company from disk failures, and was backed-up to an on-site external disk and also off-site using, at first, Backup Direct. At a later review, the off-site backup solution was swapped for Acronis, as they had begun to offer a more attractive solution at a better value.

Revelation Films’ move to their new premises in Central London a number of years later coincided with a tentative shift towards cloud computing, as their Exchange mail server solution was migrated to Exchange Online – a part of Microsoft 365. This move towards the cloud was accelerated once identity management was given over to Azure Active Directory a couple of years later.

This left their now adolescent Dell server with only file-serving duties remaining. Now end-of-life, this server was finally put to rest once a NAS was installed. Multimedia files were increasing exponentially in size as Revelation Films kept up with the high standards expected of a modern production company. This NAS allowed them to work on files in the office, but also to access those same files when working remotely or from home.

At this point their connection to the net was upgraded from a 40mbps fibre broadband solution to a gigabit leased line, ensuring their data transfer speeds could cope with the large video files being shuttled back and forth.

All of this put Revelation Films in a good position to switch to home working during 2020 and 2021, as most of their systems were already cloud-based and highly mobile.

Currently, Plan IT Support continues to work with Revelation Films in evolving their IT and communications solutions as they move towards a VoIP telephone system. This will replace a legacy PBX system that was provided by their building, but is due to be switched off in the spring.