The Farm Group

When The Farm Group built its newest facility in Soho, London, it sought a high performance KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) provider to supply the infrastructure for a series of editing and effects suites.

With locations in the UK and the US, The Farm Group provides both talent and facilities for television, broadcast and post-production companies. Its Soho site incorporates four buildings which house various configurations of editing and effects suites, audio studios, and various other creative technical equipment which need to be linked together to enable a variety of talent to use them.

The facilities new building includes 18 offline suites, six online suites, three effects rooms, seven sound studios and four sound preparation areas. The suites are rented out to production companies on an hourly, daily and weekly basis. A KVM solution was required to store all equipment and hardware in a central location, outside of the suites, freeing up space, increasing security and eliminating excess heat and noise.

Computing resources and equipment could now be removed from the editing suites into a central server room. This helps to eliminate disruptive noise, and also improves workspace ergonomics from an aesthetic perspective. Furthermore, the solution provides the flexibility to instantly switch between systems located in different suites from one workstation. Not only this, but the solution also gives The Farm Group the additional flexibility with regards to downtime. Historically, if a machine was faulty it either had to be replaced immediately, plugged in and configured, or the client using it had to be moved to a new room. Now, however, if a computer should fail, downtime is eliminated with a simple switch over to another machine.