Sesame Street, the world-renowned children’s television program continuously running since 1969, will be preserved into the 21st century thanks to an asset management initiative undertaken by the Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit educational organization that produces the show.
Nexsan Technologies and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies will provide Sesame Workshop with a data storage solution as part of the organization’s asset and archive initiative, digitally storing 35 years of media content and making it available online for use in future productions.
Seventy-four million kids from three generations have watched at least one of the more than 4,000 episodes of Sesame Street since it debuted Nov. 10, 1969. All of these past and future episodes, including programming from other Sesame Workshop shows, like the award-winning Dragon Tales and Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, will be stored on a Nexsan ATABeast disk vault featuring Hitachi Deskstar hard drives. The overall data storage capacity for the enterprise-class RAID array will total 10.5TB.
“Hitachi and Nexsan have solved a technology and budget challenge for Sesame Workshop,” said Fred Cotton, Sesame Workshop director of technical operations. “We frequently draw upon archived content for use in newer productions and immediate online access to our video library is a requirement. Nexsan and Hitachi have provided an ideal solution that is consistent with their shared reputation for storage innovation.”
In seeking vendors for the DAM project, Sesame Workshop sought a flexible system across heterogeneous environments. Nexsan’s ATABeast, which contains 42 high-capacity 250GB Hitachi disk drives, enables higher availability and greater data protection of Sesame Workshop’s assets. Rather than simply archiving the vast amounts of video, the project will enable Sesame Workshop to also have immediate online access to all of its content.
ATABeast is an enterprise-class RAID array built around the latest ATA technology from Nexsan incorporating high-capacity ATA disk drives from Hitachi. It is OS independent, needing no special software drivers or server-based management applications. ATABeast’s advanced design ensures that all components are also redundant and hot-swappable.
Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 hard drives deliver up to 250GB of storage capacity.
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