Built for the World’s Biggest Stage

How MoovIT Uses TrueNAS to Bring Real Control to Global Sports Media Workflows

In global sports media, the final whistle is just the beginning. Behind every match is a massive production chain moving assets between editors, broadcasters, sponsors, and rights holders. This content must move fast, stay protected, and remain accessible long after the trophies are handed out.

For MoovIT, a systems integrator and software developer based in Cologne, Germany, storage is the foundation of this process. With 15 years of experience supporting major global football tournaments and European football events, MoovIT builds the infrastructure for high-pressure environments where reliability isn’t a goal. It’s a requirement.

MoovIT needed a platform they could shape around the workflow, rather than a black box that forced the workflow to bend around the hardware. TrueNAS provided that control.

From Qatar to the World

During a major global football tournament in Qatar, MoovIT deployed TrueNAS flash systems as handoff points for production content. These systems received event content and exposed shares to external broadcasters, sponsors, and other rights holders. It wasn’t a lab test. It was a live production workflow on the world’s biggest stage.

“The experience was great,” says Jan Fröhling, one of MoovIT’s founders.

That success turned TrueNAS from a technical curiosity into a trusted part of MoovIT’s storage strategy. Unlike specialized hardware that often sits idle after an event, the Qatar systems were repurposed or sold into other customer environments, extending their value well beyond the final match.

Today, that footprint is expanding. MoovIT is currently deploying TrueNAS for large-scale archives supporting a major global football tournament in 2026, storing petabytes of content on a reliable platform that can support transport back to the event organizer’s headquarters or other locations after the event. They are also moving TrueNAS into active UEFA production environments, replacing legacy walled-garden video storage with a more flexible, condensed alternative.

“We Can Do Better”

The shift to TrueNAS often happens when MoovIT sees a customer about to over-invest in limited hardware. For a recent global sports archive project, the client was already reviewing quotes for a different storage provider.

“I just slipped in and said, ‘Whoa, we can do better than that,’” Fröhling recalls.

It wasn’t just a pricing play. It was a technical judgment. For a global sports archive, MoovIT needed:

ZFS integrity: Self-healing protection for high-value media assets.

Massive scale: Large R-Series systems and expansion chassis to manage petabyte-scale requirements.

Workflow fit: A platform that can be shaped around the archive process rather than a fixed appliance model.

Replacing Complexity Without Sacrificing Performance

In an upcoming UEFA production workflow, MoovIT is positioning TrueNAS to replace an existing scale-out cluster. The goal is to move from a complex, multi-node system to a more condensed, high-performance footprint.

This highlights the TrueNAS wedge:

Compared with consumer NAS systems, TrueNAS offers deeper control over latency, metadata, and ZFS tuning that basic NAS units can’t match.

Compared with proprietary storage platforms, TrueNAS provides a professional toolbox that MoovIT can optimize themselves, avoiding the high costs and rigid architectures of specialized vendors.

“When I started seriously looking into TrueNAS, I was comparing it with OpenDrives,” Fröhling said. “I was asking the OpenDrives guys, why should I pay so much for your system?”

For MoovIT, TrueNAS offered the control and flexibility they needed without the same cost structure.

Tuning the Workflow

Media storage is a balancing act. Editors need low latency. Archives need massive capacity. Usually, these needs pull infrastructure in opposite directions.

“For video production, you need very low latency and often very high capacity,” Fröhling explains. “ZFS is the key here.”

With TrueNAS, MoovIT fine-tunes systems using ARC caching, metadata separation on dedicated VDEVs, and workload-specific block-size adjustments. This allows them to use one platform across the media spectrum:

Ingest and transcoding: High-speed flash for immediate processing.

Post-production: Shared storage for Adobe Premiere teams.

Handoff and archive: High-density storage for long-term protection and transport.

Reliable Enough to Recommend

For a systems integrator, every recommendation carries reputational risk. If the storage fails, MoovIT is the one who gets the call.

“What I liked about TrueNAS was that it wasn’t the typical ‘we can do everything’ pitch,” Fröhling says. “It was an understatement. They said, ‘We have a reliable system, try it for yourself.’ That fits how we work.”

After years of testing TrueNAS in their own labs and in the field, MoovIT’s technical curiosity has evolved into professional confidence. For some of the world’s most visible sports events, they now have a platform they can test, tune, and verify.

“You can rely on it,” Fröhling concludes. “I’m happy to recommend it to my beloved customers.”

FAQs

Q: Why did MoovIT replace an existing cluster with TrueNAS? 
A: MoovIT is replacing an existing scale-out cluster in an upcoming UEFA production workflow to move from a complex, multi-node system to a more condensed, high-performance footprint, giving them deeper control over latency, metadata, and ZFS tuning than a fixed appliance model allows.

Q: Is TrueNAS a good alternative to OpenDrives for media production storage? 
A: For MoovIT, yes. Founder Jan Fröhling compared TrueNAS directly with OpenDrives and found TrueNAS delivered the same control and flexibility without the same cost structure, avoiding the high costs and rigid architecture of specialized proprietary vendors.

Q: How does TrueNAS handle ZFS tuning for large media archives? 
A: MoovIT fine-tunes TrueNAS using ARC caching, metadata separation on dedicated VDEVs, and workload-specific block-size adjustments, allowing one platform to serve ingest and transcoding, shared post-production storage, and long-term archive and handoff needs.