Mount Zion Baptist Church Extends its Gospel

In Install Newsby admin

Old Hickory Blvd ServiceFounded in 1866, just three years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Mount Zion Baptist Church (Mount Zion) is one of the oldest black churches in Nashville. As the church continues to grow – today, Mount Zion has more than 30 ministries and 30,000 members – it seeks to provide its congregation with a variety of opportunities to celebrate and reaffirm their faith, including broadcast and On Demand video. To ensure members consistently have access to inspirational and educational media content, Mount Zion turned to Small Tree’s TitaniumZ-8 (TZ8), using the robust and highly affordable shared storage system as its video editing team’s server.

Recording each service, as well as ministry events scheduled throughout the year, Mount Zion captures a substantial amount of footage. Each December, the church develops a ‘year in review’ video to share with its congregation, highlighting the impact offerings made to Mount Zion have within the communities it serves as well as around the world. As a result, the editing team requires easy access to footage taken at various times of the year. With the TZ8, post-production editors are able to locate the files they need easily and quickly, helping maximize the team’s efficiency and productivity.

“The TitaniumZ has been essential for project management,” said Mark Jackson, head of production for Mount Zion. “It’s comforting knowing that when you need a file it will be accessible the moment you need it. Before shifting to Small Tree’s solution we had been storing media on portable drives – having to sift through different drives to find the footage we needed. Not anymore.”

Typically used as a shared storage device by post-production facilities and video-editing teams, Small Tree’s TZ8 is a full-featured, Ethernet-based, high-performance appliance with advanced file sharing capabilities – the server, networking and storage are all accommodated within the TZ8’s 2U rack mount design. At Mount Zion, the TZ8 is connected to seven iMac and MacBook workstations, including two featuring 10 GbE connections to provide superior performance.

“Our initial need was a cost-friendly server that would allow us to archive and access media without any performance headaches, and the TZ8 has addressed all of those needs,” stated Jackson. “Now, we can look to using the system as a storage solution, improving our workflow even further.”