How Dynamic Catholic Powers Large-Scale Video Production with 45Drives XL60 Storage
Dynamic Catholic is a nonprofit focused on re-energizing the Catholic Church in America by developing world class content such as books, parish resources, and digital media. As the organization expanded its online presence through YouTube, daily gospel reflections, and video-based faith formation content, its infrastructure requirements grew rapidly.
To support that growth, Dynamic Catholic needed a reliable and scalable storage platform capable of handling hundreds of terabytes of raw production footage while remaining simple enough for a lean internal IT team to manage efficiently.
Today, the organization relies on multiple 45Drives XL60 systems running open source software Rocky Linux and ZFS to support centralized video workflows, long-term archival storage, offsite replication, and ransomware protection.
“We put a lot of stuff on YouTube and a lot of stuff on our website,” explained Erik Minter, IT Team Leader at Dynamic Catholic. “All that is raw video footage stored on our 45Drives server.”
Customer Overview
Dynamic Catholic is a Catholic nonprofit organization dedicated to evangelization through digital content, educational programming, books, and parish-based resources. The organization produces a growing volume of online media, including gospel reflections, Advent and Lent preparation programs, and educational video content distributed across YouTube and its website.
Erik Minter, IT Team Leader at Dynamic Catholic, oversees the organization’s entire infrastructure environment, including networking, storage, backup systems, identity management, and security operations.
“I’m kind of like a jack of all trades here,” Minter explained. “I’m overseeing everything from firewall configurations, network configurations, 45Drives configurations, identity and access management, backup and replication everything under the sun.”
As the organization’s digital content strategy expanded, so did the need for reliable, enterprise-grade storage infrastructure capable of supporting ongoing media growth.
The Challenge: Managing Rapidly Growing Video Archives
As Dynamic Catholic increased its investment in digital media, the organization’s storage requirements expanded significantly.
The production team continuously generates large volumes of raw video footage for daily and seasonal programming, creating long-term archival and workflow management challenges.
“We kind of ran up to our limits of storage capacity,” said Minter.
The organization’s existing environment had grown to roughly 500TB of raw storage capacity supporting centralized SMB shares for video editors and long-term media retention.
“When you start building up all that footage over time, it becomes a pretty massive amount of data,” Minter explained throughout the discussion.
Beyond capacity growth, the organization also faced aging infrastructure concerns.
“Our drives had been on for six years at this point,” Minter explained. “Seagate stopped manufacturing the hard drives that we had.”
Dynamic Catholic needed a solution capable of delivering:
· Long-term scalability for future video growth
· Reliable redundancy and backup protection
· Fast editor access to centralized media storage
· Simplified administration for a small IT team
· Strong ransomware protection and offsite recovery
· Open-source flexibility without vendor lock-in
The organization also needed infrastructure that could remain operationally simple while supporting enterprise-scale media workloads.
The Solution: 45Drives XL60 Storage Infrastructure
To support future growth, Dynamic Catholic deployed new 45Drives XL60 systems configured with high-capacity 32TB Seagate HAMR drives running Rocky Linux and ZFS.
The systems serve as centralized storage repositories for the organization’s video production workflows, allowing editors to export raw footage directly into SMB shares hosted on the storage environment.
“We wanted them to be quicker,” said Minter. “We put more RAM in each of them. We got a newer processor and link aggregation on ten gig ports.”
Dynamic Catholic configured the environment using ZFS RAIDZ2 storage pools to provide both performance and redundancy while maintaining simplified administration.
· Centralized Media Storage: Video editors export and manage raw footage directly from centralized SMB shares hosted on the XL60 systems.
· High-Capacity Scalability: The deployment leverages large-capacity 32TB drives to significantly expand long-term storage density.
· Offsite Mirrored Replication: Dynamic Catholic maintains a second mirrored backup server at an offsite datacenter location to improve redundancy and disaster recovery.
“We have two identical servers basically,” Minter explained. “One is the main one which hosts the SMB share, and then the other one is the mirrored one-for-one backup downtown.”
· Simplified ZFS Administration: The organization benefits from ZFS resiliency and simplified hardware maintenance workflows.
“It was actually how easy it was to replace the drive,” said Minter. “You just offline the disk, slot another one in, hit replace, and it resilvers the disk for you. The whole storage pool is unaffected.”
· Ransomware Protection: Dynamic Catholic also implemented 45Drives SnapShield protection to help detect ransomware activity and automatically isolate compromised systems.
“What really sold me on that was the fact that as soon as it detects data being encrypted or exfiltrated, it will pop the connection,” Minter said. “Peace of mind. It’s worth it.”
Results & Benefits
By integrating 45Drives XL60 systems into its media workflow, Dynamic Catholic achieved:
· Expanded Storage Capacity: The organization successfully modernized its environment while preparing for continued growth in video production and archival requirements.
· Improved Operational Simplicity: Despite managing hundreds of terabytes of storage, the systems remained approachable and manageable for a lean IT team.
“It’s really not too complicated once you get down into it,” Minter explained.
· Increased Redundancy and Protection: Offsite mirrored backups and SnapShield ransomware protection improved operational resilience and disaster recovery preparedness.
· Faster Infrastructure Performance: Updated processors, expanded RAM, and 10Gb networking improved overall workflow responsiveness for editors and administrators.
· Long-Term Scalability: The deployment provides a foundation for ongoing growth as Dynamic Catholic continues expanding its digital media initiatives.
“We just want to keep growing it.”
Support Experience
For Dynamic Catholic, one of the most valuable aspects of the deployment was the collaborative support experience provided by the 45Drives team.
Minter specifically highlighted the role of 45Drives technicians in helping the organization better understand Linux, ZFS, and large-scale storage architecture.
“He’s always been our go-to guy at 45Drives,” Minter said while discussing 45Drives technician Aldous. “Every one of his emails is super helpful and thought out and personal as well.”
The organization also appreciated the practical, engineering-focused approach taken throughout the deployment process.
“Best customer service I’ve ever experienced,” Minter explained. “Even your sales team is fantastic. They don’t try to push you on stuff you don’t need.”
That collaborative relationship helped Dynamic Catholic not only deploy infrastructure successfully, but also build internal confidence working with open-source technologies and ZFS-based storage environments.
“At the end of the day, we just needed something reliable that we could continue growing with.” — Erik Minter
Listen to the Full Story
In this episode of What’s Spinning?, Brett Kelly sits down with Erik Minter, IT Team Leader at Dynamic Catholic, to discuss large-scale video storage, ZFS architecture, Linux infrastructure, ransomware protection, and the operational realities of managing hundreds of terabytes of production footage with a lean IT team.
From RAIDZ2 and SnapShield to offsite replication and high-capacity HAMR drives, the conversation provides a practical look at how modern open-source infrastructure supports large-scale media workflows.