In Broadcast - May 2014 - 40

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 31 - MAY 2014

N E W S

InFILE

Data Management For M&E Providers
What lies ahead in the world of data management for media and entertainment...

By Steve Mackey
VP International at Spectra Logic

T

40

he volume of information used
by individuals and organisations
is growing aggressively.
A multiplicity of drivers is behind
this trend: a growing consumer
demand for real-time access to
information across a wide range
of devices, big data analytics and
tighter regulation, to name a few.
Combined, these drivers represent
a major challenge for today's
businesses aspiring to access and,
in some cases provide, real-time
access to vast volumes of data.
Storage, a key component of the
IT infrastructure, is at the heart of
a company's ability to store, locate
and retrieve data and therefore
underpins the success of any media
and entertainment provider.
Centred upon the provision and
commercialisation of digital content,
the media entertainment industry
is undergoing rapid transformation.
Technological innovation has led to
an explosion of online content-rich
providers across video, music and
other consumer applications, such
as NetFlix, Spotify and Viber.

Spectra T-Series tape libraries offer
highly reliable, high-density storage
and seamlessly scale to exabyte
capacity levels

As the industry integrates more
closely with the internet, the

methods used to deliver and archive
media are inevitably changing.
Furthermore, the continuous rise
in densities and frame rates only
serve to exacerbate the situation,
as more costly storage is required.
Industry players therefore need
to consider and future-proof their
storage and data management
requirements with care.

Future Planning
Simply put, media and entertainment
providers can simply invest further
in storage. But the challenge is how
to remain competitive. This requires
using resources efﬁciently. A recent
IDC report revealed that, between
2013 and 2017, growth in storage
will be less steep than it was a
few years ago. This is because
organisations are embracing new
ways of utilising their storage more
efﬁciently, employing techniques
such as thin provisioning, storage
tiering, and virtualisation.
An additional reason for the slower
rate of growth in storage over the
coming years is that companies
are transitioning their data to
cloud-based environments. The
cloud provides an affordable and
expansive means of storage, but
the risk of data loss is significant.

Tape In The Cloud
Tape offers an affordable, easy to
manage and safe way of maintaining
large sets of data and has time
and again prevented catastrophic
data loss. Indeed, cloud providers

have themselves
embraced tape
storage technology
to protect their
customers' data.
A significant
obstacle for media
and entertainment
providers is how to
transfer very large
files to the cloud.
Solid State Disks
offer a solution
for companies
negotiating with
smaller
data
volumes but is too
time-consuming for transferring
larger files of, for example, a
petabyte: assuming uninterrupted
use of a 1Gb Ethernet network,
moving one petabyte from disk
to the cloud would take 104 days.
By comparison, using tape to
move the same data, assuming a
1.24 GB/s ingest rate, requires a
total of 9.5 days.
For many media and entertainment
providers, the move to cloud is
essential to support the anticipated
growth in data volumes over the
coming years. This stands to reason,
however cloud storage remains
expensive, costing around $1 per
GB. Furthermore, today's cloud
will eventually pose a signiﬁcant
business threat as it, in turn, will
need to cope with larger datasets. It
is therefore essential for data to be
easily moved to and from the cloud.
Tape is well placed to do this. In
October last year, Spectra Logic
launched a new deep storage
solution BlackPearl, which has been
speciﬁcally designed to handle large
datasets in cloud environments. In
terms of performance it can handle
400 MB/second reads/writes, up to
six SAS tape drives and up to four

Spectra's tape libraries offer
efﬁcient, comprehensive library
management tools

Fibre Channel tape drives. While
traditional tape library systems are
well equipped to offer the longterm retention of data at a low cost,
they lack the ability to efﬁciently
stream large storage objects and
do not contain interfaces for the
cloud's on-demand and self-service
functionality.

Deep Storage
Spectra's tape technology has
provided back-up, archive and
data asset management for over
30 years to some of the most
prestigious media organisations in
the world, including NBC, National
Geographic and Technicolor.
By addressing the problems of
slow retrieval and bottlenecks in bulk
I/O operations, Spectra Logic has
designed a deep storage solution
that is ideally placed for media
and entertainment organisations
of the future, as it solves the most
commonly found problems and
allows customers to implement a
cloud-ready archive.

Metus MAM Now Integrated With Avid Media Composer
T

he Advanced Authoring Format
(AAF) is a professional file
interchange format designed

Metus MAM

for the video post- production
environment. AAF format became
widely associated with Avid and

Avid Media Composer.
Metus MAM recognises AAF
files, handles the file transfers

automatically, and treats AAF ﬁles
as media asset links to actual
source files.
Media Composer editors either
MAC or Windows are able to use
any Metus MAM client to browse the
media from archive, and will beneﬁt
the ease of use by directly importing
AAF ﬁles, thus media ﬁles and other
info, to Media Composer.
The edited content will be copied
to MAM via watch folders.
Support for Avid DNxHD (encode/
decode/transcode) and AAF, simply
underlines Metus MAM again, as
a fully integrated solution for
Avid workflows.

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