Outage? What outage? How NexGen saved the day at Gold 104.3

It was just another Friday afternoon in commercial production. Or so Ray Peters thought.

Peters, sound designer at ARN’s Melbourne HQ, was counting down to the weekend ahead when suddenly, one by one, ARN’s metro stations started going offline and off air.

A massive IT outage had decided to make its presence felt.

“By the time it hit Melbourne, there were ‘blue screens of death’ as far as the eye could see,” Peters tells Radio Today.

Just after 3pm, Gold 104.3’s playout system – like so many others – was down and the emergency tape was running.

“So, with no Zetta, I’m sitting in production and realise I still have access to the old NexGen system that hasn’t been used since October last year,” says Peters.

“I occasionally use it to check audio levels and it still holds the music database.”

Gold announcers Jason Staveley and Joe Bovalino (main photo) were alerted to the fact that NexGen was still operational, and that normal music programming could resume if it was patched into the control room.

Staveley and Bovalino swung into action.

“Luckily the old NexGen database hadn’t been disconnected since our Zetta changeover last year,” says Staveley.

Staveley says ARN’s Digital Broadcast Manager Daniel Ennis was central to enacting the plan.

“What a great team of people we have at Gold104.3.”

And team work, says Peters, is what made it all go off without a hitch.

“By 5pm, NexGen from my commercial production studio is feeding audio out to Gold 104.3 while Jason and Joe are ferociously banging on the keyboard loading music while (Content Director) Sue Carter adds sweepers.”

“The afternoon music log was playing, rather than the back up tape over and over.”

Just before 7pm, the engineering team had rebooted Zetta which then started syncing with NexGen.

Peters say the changeover was faultless.

“Moral of this story? Have at least 3 redundancy levels in your operation and never discount old software.”