The demanding and rapidly evolving sports media industry needs to ensure that new and historical content is always available when needed for the creation and delivery of stories and footage quickly to their dedicated and enthusiastic fan bases. Secure, cost-effective, long-term protection of these assets is paramount for the continued monetization of this content. 

According to Parks Associates, annual sports OTT subscription revenue in the U.S. was $13.1 billion in 2022 and will almost double to approximately $22.6 billion in 2027, a 73% increase in five years. There’s an opportunity for media companies to monetize historical content, in particular, but first they need to understand the technologies driving enhanced storage and the key components required to ensure long-term content preservation. After all, if content is no longer usable due to corruption from inadequate protection, monetization isn’t possible.  

Future-proofed, resilient, and secure content storage enables better monetization of sports content. 

Key Storage Challenges for Sports Applications
Sports media organizations need all their assets to be easily accessible, safe, secure and all in one place. One of the biggest challenges with storing sports media assets is long-term content preservation. Sports content must be stored for an extensive period of time. It’s important for media organizations to consider whether in 20 years’ time their storage solution will still be able to read the content. Moreover, determining how the storage will be maintained is imperative. 

Mitigating unpredictable costs for storing assets over a long period of time is also crucial. The cost of storing content in the public cloud may be clear today, but it can change in the future. Deploying a storage solution with long-term cost predictability will help media companies successfully monetize their assets.

Key Components for Long-Term Content Preservation
Traditionally, sports media organizations relied on LTO storage due to its low cost. However, recovering content from LTO is slower compared with other archive types. Now, organizations are moving more toward the cloud to gain greater flexibility and scalability, but the cost of pulling out an asset from long-term cloud storage can be substantial. It’s hard to anticipate when an asset might need to pulled from storage.

While cloud and tape are options today, there are inherent challenges in terms of cost, security, and performance. These issues can be addressed with software-defined object storage, utilizing the same cloud-native S3 interface and capabilities that power the public cloud. 

Leading object-storage based archive solutions run on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware. As lower cost hardware becomes available, media companies can take advantage. Moreover, using object-based storage for long-term content preservation ensures protection against bit rot and long-term loss of content. Erasure coding technology enables seamless upgrades from smaller hard drives to larger hard drives. Ultimately, by choosing an object-based storage solution that is affordable, secure, and easily accessible, sports organizations can tap into their archive for monetization purposes.

Latest Innovations in Content Storage Include Cloud, Edge, and AI/ML
While many media organizations are embracing on-premises solutions for long-term content preservation, more and more, they are using the cloud for live sports production because it is flexible, scalable, and efficient. We’re seeing a shift toward cloud-native storage solutions as media companies look to unlock greater efficiencies and scale storage capacity based on changing requirements. 

Another key trend is storage at the edge. Most of live sports production is done at remote locations such as sports venues. Edge storage is cost-effective, as it eliminates the need for sports media companies to move video to a physical location during the live event. Sports fans benefit because they receive content fast, without any delays.

During a live sports broadcast, there is not a lot of editing that goes on. But highlights and replays created after the event is over are done at a location outside of the edge. Moving content between the core (i.e., a facility or production center), edge (i.e., a remote venue), and the cloud can be done effortlessly by partnering with an expert in workflow solutions. 

AI and ML technology are also pushing the envelope of innovation, enabling faster content search and access, as well as enhanced metadata awareness. When sports media companies are streaming live highlights, they need information about the content at the edge. Until now, AI and ML functionality has almost exclusively been limited to the cloud, but the tides are changing. 

Technology providers like Perifery, a division of DataCore, are looking to bring cloud-enabled AI/ML applications to the edge to make content search more intelligent and to open up new monetization opportunities for sports media companies. 

Future-proof Storage Strategies
Sports media companies can take a few different approaches toward ensuring their content storage acts as foundation for future monetization. First, sports content must be easily accessible all the time. A great example are cloud-based storage solutions that assure easy access to searching and retrieving files from the archive through a web-based content portal, available over HTTP/S3, which are standard interfaces. 

Moreover, metadata awareness is critical. By choosing a storage solution that couples data and metadata together, sports media companies can perform a multi-level search in metadata as well as data. Adding a panel between the content storage solution and popular video editing software applications will enrich the metadata of searched objects and speed up the search for media assets, optimizing content browsing and enabling increased monetization.

Furthermore, content needs to be stored in more than one place. Using a storage solution that supports the core (i.e., on-premises data center), cloud, the edge empowers sports media companies to utilize a storage option that matches their evolving business goals.

Having a strategy for long-term content preservation is imperative if sports media organizations want to monetize their content. Through a mix of core, edge, and cloud-based storage, powered by AI and ML technology, sports media organizations can mitigate unpredictable costs, ensure immediate access to content, and locate content clips faster.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Data storage provider XenData has announced the CX-10 Plus, a cloud archive appliance with local backup to LTO data tape. 

The appliance connects to a local network and provides a fast gateway to unlimited cloud object storage, the company explained. Content written to the cloud is mirrored to LTO data cartridges creating a local backup copy for greatly enhanced data protection. This saves money as it is an alternative to paying for geo-replication from the cloud provider. And if there is a need to move to a different cloud provider, files can be restored from the LTO backup, avoiding expensive egress fees.

“The CX-10 Plus has two key benefits,” explained Dr. Phil Storey, XenData CEO. “Creating a local synchronized copy of every file written to the cloud gives peace of mind. And the Appliance easily pays for itself by minimizing cloud storage fees.”

The appliance is optimized for media archives allowing users to play video files directly from the cloud. Furthermore, it has proven integration with many complementary media applications including media asset management systems. It provides a fast connection to cloud object storage by using multi-threaded archive and restore operations, even when transferring a single large video file, the company said. 

The CX-10 Plus supports multiple clouds including Amazon Web Services S3, Azure blob storage, Wasabi S3 and Seagate Lyve object storage. It supports multiple cloud storage tiers including AWS Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Glacier and Azure Hot, Cool and Archive tiers.

Content written to the cloud is mirrored to LTO data cartridges creating a local backup copy. The Appliance manages up to two external LTO drives or an LTO autoloader and it includes a 14 TB disk cache which is used to implement the LTO backup, as follows: 

• All archived files are first written to the CX-10 Plus internal 14 TB disk cache from where they are immediately uploaded to the designated cloud storage.
• The archived files are retained on the cache for a defined retention period, typically a day.
• Every few hours the files are synchronized to LTO creating a mirror copy of the file-folder structure that has been archived to the cloud.

The CX-10 Plus will be available in September 2022.  Prices start at $11,950, excluding the managed LTO drive or autoloader.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—Data storage solution provider has launched an object storage S3 interface for its entire range of on-premise active archives that provide long-term secure storage on LTO data tape cartridges. 

The launch transforms the XenData archive systems into private cloud data repositories that compete with public cloud storage services such as AWS Glacier and the Archive Tier of Azure object storage. The S3 interface is enabled by a simple software upgrade.

Dr Phil Storey, XenData CEO, explained that “our new private cloud solutions keep the attractive aspects of LTO on-premises archives which include cost effective scalability and adds the ease of distributed access which has traditionally been associated with public cloud storage.”

For active archives with capacities above 100 TB, storage systems based on LTO data tape libraries have an attractive total cost of ownership that is significantly lower than public cloud object storage, XenData reported.  

An S3 enabled XenData LTO archive provides restore times of around 2 minutes which is suitable for most infrequently accessed data repositories. And when compared to AWS Glacier or Azure Archive Tier object storage, the XenData private cloud solution provides higher performance at a lower cost, free of any egress charges, the company reported. 

The new S3 interface allows remote access to a XenData LTO archive from anywhere worldwide using secure HTTPS. It also supports replication of one LTO archive to a second LTO system at another location which can even be on a different continent. 

In addition to the S3 interface, XenData launches Global Sync, a synchronization service that links multiple S3 enabled LTO archives, creating a single global file system accessible anywhere worldwide. 

As soon as a file is archived to LTO at one location, it becomes available as a stub file within the global file system. When a user makes a change by writing, overwriting or deleting a file, that change is propagated to all locations. This provides a consistent up-to-date set of files across the entire distributed organization. 

When files are restored from another location, they are transferred directly using peer to peer multi-threaded HTTPS which delivers secure fast file transfers. The Global Sync service uses a cloud database, but the files themselves are never stored in public cloud object storage, avoiding cloud storage and egress fees. Furthermore, because the new service only synchronizes file system metadata, it requires minimal Internet bandwidth, XenData reported. 

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—KVIE is a PBS member station licensed to Sacramento. In addition to producing national series such as “America’s Heartland” or statewide series like “Inside California Education,” we produce local series like “Studio Sacramento” and “Rob on the Road.” KVIE has two studios and nine Adobe Premiere Pro edit bays.

For years we had an outside integrator manage our edit and storage systems. Unfortunately we couldn’t control the costs of maintaining the system because it was pieced together from multiple vendors; in addition we were also reliant on a third party for support. As the on-site engineer, I didn’t like having to tell my team that they were down until I got support. When our integrator announced his retirement, we decided to rebuild the entire system from the ground up in order to be able to locally administer it.

CHECKING ALL THE BOXES

In our old system, there was no redundancy built into our LTO library, so on the occasions when we lost a tape all that data was gone. LTO is marketed as a cheaper solution compared to spinning disk, but it can be quite costly when you factor in redundancy, support and migration to new LTO standards.

Our old system was built using multiple vendors for edit and storage. This meant that an upgrade to one system could easily break the workflow to another, so upgrades usually came with growing pains. KVIE wanted a streamlined system we could manage without constantly asking for outside help, so I started looking for a single-vendor solution.

Avid is the only vendor I found that provides an end-to-end solution across asset management and storage. My boss came from an Avid Unity environment and found it easy to manage and reliable. However, our editors liked using Premiere Pro and did not want to switch to Media Composer just for the asset management. So when I discovered Avid systems worked with Premiere Pro, it checked all the boxes on both the technical and creative sides.

We invested in Avid NEXIS | E5 NL nearline storage, NEXIS | E4, NEXIS | System Director Appliance (SDA) and MediaCentral | Asset Management with HP servers for a virtual machine environment. A lot of people think you need to use Media Composer with MediaCentral, but Avid has done a lot over the years to integrate it with Premiere. It can do all the things our old MAM can do and much more.

MAKING THE SWITCH

We placed the order in June but had to put the integration on hold for a while due to the lockdown. Once the integration started, it took roughly three months to install, get the infrastructure in place and do some engineering on the back end. We developed a procedure to migrate the most relevant content and metadata first, so we could clean up the archive as we went.

We switched from an LTO tape archive to an Avid NEXIS | E5 NL so everything’s faster. Nearline storage is more appropriate for us because we repackage materials. A new episode of “America’s Heartland” hasn’t been shot in five or six years, but we repackage them as “greatest hits” shows, so we’re constantly pulling seasons of material from the archive. Switching to 10-Gig connections off an Avid NEXIS E5 NL improves our speed and ability to not only re-archive content once it’s edited, but also gain back space, which was a big limitation with LTO.

There’s a perception that Avid is expensive, but by committing to five years of support, our annual operational costs have gone down significantly. Everything is doubled up—we have two controllers on the E5 NL, two on the E4, two on the SDA and high-availability VM servers—so if anything fails, there’s no downtime.

Avid’s support is great and super fast. When I see a firmware update, I know it’s Avid-approved and won’t break the rest of the system. As well as being a system that we can manage in-house, it’s easily expandable—we can easily add another Avid NEXIS E5 or expand the Avid NEXIS E4.

We also like the fact that Avid is a stable company that will still be here five years from now. It gives us a clear path forward for future upgrades and expansion.

Todd Cima is the assistant chief engineer at PBS KVIE. He has worked at the PBS station for six years. He can be contacted at tcima@kvie.org.

For more information, visit www.avid.com.

Ongoing technological advances and changes to operational environments mean that most M&E organizations have or will consider moving some or all or their on-prem content to private or public cloud storage. This involves a deep dive into the cost, features, integration, performance and time drivers that vary for every business. To start, let’s examine different types of deployment.

Public Cloud only—immediately attractive for start-ups and green-field deployments; responsive performance and distribution.  

Private Cloud only—typically attractive to enterprises who generate high volumes of content and who are able to build appropriately-scaled private storage. 

Public + Private Cloud—private for control, public for burst processing. Also attractive for disaster recovery and integration with external partners.

Hybrid Public/On-prem—offers a phased evolution to cloud. Hybrid is required (at least temporarily) if uninterrupted access to data is required during migration.

Multicloud hybrid—Allows content to be managed in the most cost-effective tier via intelligent storage management.

The suitability of each of these deployment models depends on the type of content you have and your specific business model. A deeper dive is required to make an appropriate choice.

CONSIDERATIONS

Cost and performance modelling goes far beyond the simple cost per month to store a TB of content. Content normalization, asset and metadata storage, deduplication, consolidation, proxies, AI analysis and metadata services should all be considered. And of course, cloud ingress and egress costs.

How much content and storage do you have?

Determine how many assets you currently have on premise and their specific file sizes.  Count the amount of tapes and the capacity of each (not each will be full but it’s a useful guideline). Don’t forget tapes on shelves or in stores.

Can you deduplicate?

Migrating only unique content reduces cost and increases speed. If done in advance it will allow better planning of capacity and cost of cloud storage. You can dedupe on file name/size, or more accurately by comparing file size and hash. 

Hardware and networks

Estimate available LTO drives and their versions. Do you have enough drives of each version to manage the migration and service day-to-day operations? You’ll also need the average time each day that a drive is available for migration duties; this may be surprisingly low.

Available bandwidth to the cloud

How much bandwidth can you get? How much can you afford? It may be faster to physically ship a NAS to a cloud provider; often, however, low availability of LTO drives means that writing to NAS is no faster than moving data over the internet.

There are some solutions to limited LTO bandwidth:

• Stop end-users driving the system. Not an option for sites continuing to send content to tape daily. 
• Rent or buy additional LTO drives. Keep tape/drive compatibility in mind as you add drives.
• Rent or buy a small LTO library and drives, and manually shuffle tapes through it. 
• Run migration processes at a lower priority than critical operations. This means that the migration generally takes longer. 

COST AND PERFORMANCE MODELLING OF PUBLIC CLOUDS

As well as the amount of content you wish to migrate to the cloud and any optional processes, you’ll also need to calculate your monthly data ingress and egress rates.

Performance models should consider the number and size of files, number of tapes, transfer speed of LTO drives, tape handling, drive availability, network bandwidth, efficiency of network object transfer processes (eg S3) and optional processes (e.g. acceleration).

Pricing models will take into account performance, storage costs and egress costs, network costs and potential hardware rental costs. Different models are required for different speeds and complexity of migrations, and developing iterations of performance and price models is important.

INTELLIGENT STORAGE MANAGEMENT

To manage migration and ongoing storage, a more sophisticated tool than the typical HSM is required to provide a seamless bridge for all integrated systems to access content during and after the migration both on-prem and in the cloud.

Intelligent Storage Management platforms (e.g. Kumulate) go beyond simple management of multiple tape and disk storage. They administer large amounts of content and metadata within a single name space and orchestrate the services and workflows through which it progresses. They manage conditional workflows and wrap, re-wrap, transcode and publish as required. This not only efficiently manages multiple storage locations and buffers MAMs, PAMs and distribution systems from storage complexity, but crucially protects content integrity over time.

ISMS AND POST-MIGRATION DATA INDEPENDENCE

Post-migration, the ISM continues to provide uninterrupted and transparent access to the content. To the user, operation continues as normal, and MAMs, PAMs or other systems can interact with normalized content and metadata without knowledge of storage, formats or wrappers. 

DATA INTEGRITY AND EVOLUTION MANAGEMENT

Each time content is moved the potential for data corruption increases. Kumulate and other ISMs regularly check the integrity of files in all cloud object stores against hashes independently stored in the ISM. This ensures a bit-for-bit match throughout the content lifecycle.

The ISM also helps mitigate the inevitable technology, business, service level and pricing changes, by maintaining multiple copies of content in multiple locations. This provides customers the critical ability to avoid vendor-lock. 

TURNING A CHORE INTO AN OPPORTUNITY

Moving entire or even partial repositories of content is often seen as a pain-point. But a content migration is the perfect opportunity to increase value and discoverability of your assets.

Here are some examples:

• Derive file hashes;
• Wrap edit projects and DPX sequences to increase speed and reduce egress costs; 
• Create descriptive metadata; 
• Transcode/re-wrap assets for normalization, new versions, or DR; 
• Create copies in disparate locations;  
• Generate proxies; 
• Generate a time aligned speech-to-text (STT) transcript; and 
• additional layers of Time Aligned Metadata:
  Text/logo/facial/location/sentiment recognition, scene/event detection, motion analysis 

CONCLUSIONS

Migrations of large media repositories are significant undertakings, but if you plan properly, take the time to evaluate existing resources and make sure that you have the relevant tools and management system, migrating from LTO to cloud can be smooth, disruption-free and a pathway to truly optimized content management.

The full version of this white paper is available at https://masstech.com/controlled-ascent-white-paper/. 

Mike Palmer is the former CTO for Masstech.

AMHERST, NY—ATTO Technology today announced a collaboration with Dell EMC that enables LTO SAS tape library sharing via Ethernet networks.

With the aid of ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200 storage controllers, it is possible to connect Dell EMC ML3 tape libraries to Ethernet, enabling new architectures and workflow possibilities, the company said.

“Adding Ethernet connectivity to Dell EMC ML3 tape libraries allows greater flexibility in data access, backup routines and in physically locating the hardware,” said Timothy Klein, president and CEO of ATTO Technology. “We’re excited to join with Dell in offering a backup and archive solution that’s not only cost-effective but gives customers more freedom than they’ve ever had with this type of hardware."

ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8200 is an accelerated hardware protocol converter. It connects Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) LTO tape drives to Ethernet networks via iSCSI, the company said.

Dell EMC ML3 LTO tape solutions provide secure backups that can be automated on a schedule suiting specific workflows, it said.

XstreamCORE ET 8200-Dell EMC ML3 combos are available exclusively through Dell EMC.

For more information, visit the ATTO Technology website.

MOSCOW—Protecting video content cost effectively is top of mind for GPMETV. A Moscow-based entertainment television broadcaster, GPMETV produces shows that cover a wide variety of subjects and genres, helping to meet the demands and interests of a large and diversified audience.

GPM-ETV has several business needs that required us to make a change to our data protection storage environment. We found that our TV productions generated very large digital video capacity requirements, forcing us to free up expensive disk storage space and to reliably archive digital content; plus we also wanted to get easy access to the archived content. Overall, GPM-ETV needed long-term content preservation at an affordable cost.

PROVIDING ROOM TO GROW

After analyzing disk-based and tape-based archive solutions, we implemented two LTO tape libraries storing 5 petabytes (PB) of digital content with the ability to expand up to 20 PB, giving us lots of room to grow. All the material from every client, including source material and air masters, is stored in the archive 24/7, which preserves the content throughout the workflow.

GPM-ETV has improved the storage archive in several areas. We store duplicate copies of the content in each library for added protection. Rarely used material is about 30%, and is stored on LTO tapes outside of the library, which helps conserve library space and costs. We found that we can easily expand library slots and drives and upgrade to the next LTO generations by making archive capacity management simple. Over the past 10 years, we have upgraded each generation from LTO-4, to LTO-5, and LTO-6 tape drives to now implementing LTO-8. At the same time, some equipment, such as some high-capacity storage-only expansion frames, have remained in operation since 2010. Ultimately, the LTO solution was cheaper than any disk offering, while still providing us with easy access to materials whenever we needed.

FLEXIBLE TO OUR NEEDS

How did we make this decision? Initially, we announced an open tender among IT integrators for an archive complex solution with a capacity near 1 PB and received five or six offers on different hardware and software solutions.

The LTO tape solution was half the price of the closest disk offer and assumed an initial low-cost starting point with the ability to expand both the number of tape slots and drives during operation. So we went with the tape solution.

When choosing tapes, you have a choice—LTO open format technology or proprietary tape formats. We chose the LTO format because it had a proven track record, published roadmap and gave us more flexibility when choosing suppliers. We have changed several suppliers of tapes, each time choosing the most advantageous offers at a price for our market.

To summarize, one of the factors in our decision was the ability to change storage equipment and transparent data transfer without the need for physical rewriting—we didn’t just expand the existing infrastructure. For example, at a certain stage, we replaced the tape libraries of one type with another. All we needed to do with the data was to move the tape cartridges from the old equipment to the new one—no rewriting. When it comes to big data space, this can be critical in a business. And yes, we can still read our data recorded on older tapes from 10 years ago. Now in our production there is not a single working disk system with data from all of those years back, but the data from the tapes is sill alive.

Aleksey Kotikov is the lead engineer for GPM-ETV’s Digital Archive Complex. He has been working in the IT industry since 1995, and in the television archive field since 2008.

For more information, visitwww.lto.org.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.—XenData has begun shipping its new X1 Archive Appliance that connects to a network and makes it possible for file-based applications to archive to LTO external drives, Sony Optical Disc Archive (ODA) drives or cloud object storage.

The appliance, which runs under Windows 10 Pro, is powered by XenData Archive Series and FS Mirror software, the company said.

The X1 appliance appears as a single logical drive called the X: drive. A variety of methods can be used to write to and restore files from the appliance, including:

• sharing the X: drive over a network and writing to it and restoring from it like any disk-based share;
• using FS Mirror to synchronize one or more locally accessible file systems or file shares to the LTO archive;
• using FS Mirror to create archive drop-boxes on the network that automatically move files to the archive; or
• using third-party applications that integrate with XenData’s XML API.

Three models of the X1 are available, one each for LTO external drives, ODA external drives and the cloud. Each relies on Intel NUC (next unit of computing) hardware and has a high-endurance 1.92TB SSD cache or enhanced performance, XenData said.

Connecting the X1 to an LTO external drive is done via Thunderbolt 3 or USB connection. For LTO drives with SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) connection, it is possible to connect via a Thunderbolt-to-SAS converter. The device can manage an unlimited number of LTO cartridges and up to 2 billion files. File transfers spanning across cartridges are supported. When using two or more attached LTO drives, the appliance supports automatic cartridge replication.

The X1 for ODA supports Gen 1, 2 and 3 drives with cartridge capacities up to 5.5TB. Connection is accomplished via USB 3. As with LTO, the X1 for ODA manages an unlimited number of cartridges. It supports file transfers using the 1.92TB cache to span cartridges.

The cloud storage model supports multiple clouds, including AWS S3, Azure and Wasabi S3. This X1 model can be configured to replicate files to different locations and cloud providers.

The LTO and ODA X1 models are priced at $5,950, and the cloud model starts at $2,495.

More information is available on the XenData website.

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from a recent white paper “Comparison of the Media Archiving Options and Costs for M&E,” commissioned by Quantum. 

ALEXANDRIA, VA.—Television stations, video producers and post houses are awash in content data, and with each passing year the demand for storage only increases. A mid-market TV station producing two hours of news each weekday will create 15 TB of data per year, which means even a small station group with six or seven stations will churn out 100 TB of content to store on a yearly basis.

That figure is significant because after only a few years this hypothetical small station group will reach the 500 TB point, a threshold—give or take several terabytes—at which time it begins to make financial sense to store this content on a lower-cost medium and free up higher-performance, more costly storage resources for more productive uses.

“Now that everyone has woken up to the fact that content is king and has long-term value, they are beginning to understand that it also has a significant cost to store,” said Steve Davis, an Atlanta- based media storage consultant who formerly was senior vice president and CTO of Crawford Communications. “It grows and grows and grows. And the bit rates are high.”

When media enterprises reach their threshold, they have three options for long-term media archiving: on-premise digital magnetic tape-based archival storage in a Linear Tape-Open (LTO) library; the cloud–either public or private; or some hybrid combination of the two.

Before choosing, these enterprises must consider four important factors: cost, performance, accessibility and security. Additionally, in some situations the operational model of a business is a fifth factor that must be part of any evaluation. Specifically, how a business operates will determine whether it is better served by making an upfront capital investment in storage technology or by choosing a recurring monthly operational expense to archive media assets.

IN THE CLOUD

Public cloud storage services, such as those offered by Amazon, Microsoft and Google, have captured the attention of media and entertainment enterprises for archiving content, largely because of pricing. However, determining the true cost of cloud archiving can be tricky. First, an M&E enterprise must decide whether it needs fast access to data stored in the cloud or it can wait a longer time to retrieve its content.

Amazon Web Services illustrates the point. Its low-cost Glacier storage ($0.004 per gigabyte per month as of this writing), which is intended for archiving applications, typically can take three to five hours for a standard retrieval. Its more expensive S3-IA (Simple Storage Service-Infrequent Access) service ($0.0125 per gigabyte per month as of this writing) promises low latency and high throughput.

Other costs, such as the per gigabyte price of data retrieved from storage, what it cost to make retrieval requests and the cost of bandwidth to connect an enterprise’s site with the cloud, must be factored in.

When it comes to security, cloud service providers contend it is impossible for a media enterprise to replicate the level of data protection they offer. They argue no media business will outspend them on the steps they take to keep data secure, and they have the certifications to prove it.

Public cloud services also can provide geo-spacing which protects archived data against the ravages of localized natural disasters, such as tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and earthquakes, by distributing data across multiple geographies.

ON-PREMISE STORAGE

M&E enterprises considering LTO-based digital storage for on-premise archiving will face an unavoidable capital expense to put a system in place. They will need an LTO robotic loader, tape drives and a tape management system.

Other associated expenses include the costs of LTO tape, the square footage needed for the system and personnel to attend to it, said Jim Casabella, president of The Jim Casabella Consulting Group in Memphis, Tenn. Enterprises should also plan for the expense of migrating to newer generations of LTO storage with time, incurring new capital costs in the process, he said. However, it should be noted that a provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 allows certain businesses to expense 100 percent of the cost of most business equipment in the first year.

Still, when measured on a per gigabyte basis, the cost of storing archival data on LTO tape maintains its advantage against other alternatives, said Casabella, who specializes in consulting with media organizations about storage archive solutions and asset management.

In terms of performance, retrieving data stored on-premise from an LTO-based library typically takes seconds or at most a few minutes. The latest generation of LTO storage technology, LTO 8, offers a data transfer rate of 360 MBps native and 750 MBps compressed.

When it comes to protecting data from entropic damage, monitoring and managing data stored on tape must be considered. Technology exists to scan LTO-stored data to validate its integrity and takes the necessary steps to protect it by automatically making a new copy of the data on a fresh tape.

Beyond this level of data protection, there is the question of maintaining the physical security of LTO tapes from theft or natural disasters. Multiple copies of tapes can be stored at different locations to protect against calamities. However, doing so also multiplies the steps needed to safeguard against theft and piracy, all of which can be planned for and professionally executed.

A HYBRID ARCHIVE

It’s common for mid-size and large M&E organizations to have multiple workflows, each with its own storage requirements. As a result, many organizations have chosen to leverage the value of a hybrid archive solution based both on cloud and on-premise storage resources. A hybrid strategy also can offer M&E enterprises the benefit of taking advantage of the best of both archiving alternatives.

Security is a good example. “You can write a copy to AWS and two to tape,” explained Nils Carson, system architect at Quantum, a provider of LTO-bases archiving solutions. “Take one copy out and send it to Iron Mountain or some other repository with the same physical security. That way you have ultimate control and can pull back any one of those copies at any time.”

Similarly, organizations can mold a hybrid approach that leverages the strengths of both the cloud and on-premise archiving when it comes to performance, accessibility and cost.

Cloud bursting, a technique to scale up processing power by leveraging more CPUs and GPUs as needed in the cloud to accomplish a compute-intensive task, offers a good use case that illustrates how M&E enterprises can take advantage of the best of both storage options.

For instance, a hypothetical media enterprise that wishes to use cloud-based artificial intelligence tools, such as speech-to-text functionality and facial recognition, to generate useful metadata describing archived video assets, can take advantage of processing power in the cloud and continue to use on-premise storage to achieve its specific cost, accessibility and security goals.

In this hybrid application, a media enterprise can temporarily push a portion of its archive—most likely lower-resolution proxy files—to the cloud where AI processing can create additional metadata. The metadata can then be retrieved and married to the on-premise archival copy, while the version of the metadata in the cloud as well as the proxy files can be discarded. The process can be repeated as budget allows until the entire LTO-based library has been updated with enhanced metadata, explained Casabella.

MAKING THE RIGHT CHOICE

While the pros and cons of each archiving option are sure to change as pricing models fluctuate, networking technologies evolve and storage media advances, enterprises without an archive strategy in place are at risk of spiraling cost structures, a loss of productivity and missing out on business opportunities.

However, with a solid archiving strategy in place, M&E enterprises can free up costly storage for more productive, revenue-generating uses while ensuring their valuable archives of media content remain safe and accessible for the long term.

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.—XenData today announced a new service to migrate files stored on LTO tape cartridges to cloud storage.

The service sidesteps the need to maintain older generations of tape drives and systems by moving files to cloud storage, the company said.

“When you are keeping archived files for a decade or more, migration is a fact of life. Our new service takes the pain out of that process, allowing files to be indexed, analyzed and shared,” said XenData CEO Phil Storey.

Archive storage systems from XenData have migration capabilities built in that make it easy to move files from older generations of LTO to the newest LTO version or the cloud.

The company is now offering a service that uses these migration technologies to move content from LTO to the cloud. LTFS, Cache-A TAR, XenData TAR and Front Porch DIVA formats are supported. The service also provides for content to be re-organized and categorized before being migrated to AWS, Microsoft Azure or Wasabi public clouds.

Migrating content to the latest LTO formats, including 6 TB LTO-7 and 12 TB LTO-8 cartridges, is also available.

LTO is under attack from a wide variety of new technologies that challenge the very existence of the format and its relevance. Coupled with the fact that many broadcasters are pushing more of their archive content onto local or private cloud platforms, it is hard to see how LTO is still standing.

For sports broadcasters, it is more important than ever to be able to see the content you have then consolidate it to create a meaningful archive that can be accessed at any time for replays or clips from old matches. And furthermore there is a strong desire to re-archive older tape formats before those tapes become unreadable and sports events of the past become completely lost. Is it relevant to put those old tapes back on to another tape format?

Is there even a point to the tape format anymore or is it only surviving because of “better the devil you know”; doomed to disappear altogether once people become educated to alternatives?

DEMAND FOR ONLINE SPORTS

Many stats point to a shake-up in traditional TV for sports coverage. Take the NFL, for example, where, according to Nielsen, viewing is down 8.2 percent from the same period last year. And, last year Sky in the U.K. stated a strong shift of viewing of the Premier League to their online platforms. Amazon are rumored to be bidding to show future Premier League seasons. Undoubtedly, the shift is set to continue, as younger viewers in particular are more likely to watch sports on digital platforms.

For digital viewing, instant access to content is a must. No wonder broadcasters are pushing more content onto on-premises or off-premises (private or public) cloud platforms. The benefits can be fantastic: with instant access to catch-up reels and to pull out historic content. What other type of content suddenly prompts the need to find something that was aired several decades ago? But that happens all the time in sports, whether that be a rundown of all the tries scored by a retiring rugby player, the re-run of a historic win, or the moment a team was promoted or even demoted.

[Read: LTO Program Introduces Generation 8 Of LTO Ultrium]

Sports broadcasters need superfast access, and not just the low-resolution proxies, to make effective use of these moments. At a recent Amazon seminar in LA a number of speakers, from global broadcasters, explained how the need for instant access meant they were hammering their LTO libraries in such a way that failure rates inevitably rose dramatically. They determined that for frequent, fast access LTO is not the appropriate platform.

Or course, tape used to be the only real option for media libraries. However, now the cost of both disk and cloud services have come down a great deal, which makes me wonder whether anyone actually prefers LTO to disk for an active archive.

TAPE WILL LIVE ON

While it is true that new formats are being released all the time and tape can’t efficiently do all that disk storage can do, it isn’t dead yet. Not only that, I believe it will live on for the foreseeable future. Given the low costs of the tape media itself, it is easy to see why it has a place for “fire and forget” workflows. Of course, there are a lot of those types of workflows, even in the sports arena. Let’s face it, we all know there are matches we never want to watch again. Even sports entertainment eventually has a shelf live, and being able to literally put a tape on a shelf with a low dollar per gigabyte cost makes a lot of sense for that content.

LTO can also integrate quite nicely with other storage solutions. For our part, our solution is used in a number of deployments with LTO partners, where MatrixStore is an active cache and the LTO is used for the “dormant” assets.

The argument will likely continue over coming years, with some stating content is more secure on tape, while others argue the opposite. The argument around cost is also a hotly debated one, with many conflicting studies on whether or not the cost gap is closing.

Ultimately, I believe a number of things:

1. Tape will be around for many years to come, however it will be used in fewer use cases than today.

One example is that it might have been previously been OK to keep old footage on the shelf just-in-case it is needed; now, old footage is sold to sports teams and is looked at for analytics and AI metadata extraction. Assuming that footage won’t be re-used at all after the live event is a dead concept. However, it could be that there is footage from minor sports events that after a certain period of time is deemed to have a low probability of being looked at again.

Maybe those use cases will be cause for a lot of tapes to be sold making the tape industry appear “steady” but only in the context of a world that is storing increasing amounts of data.

2. Tape will only really be chosen on the basis of financial reasons, as there are very few valid technical reasons to consider it.

The pure fact that tape has to wind its way through to a file, over disk, which can get to the file in nanoseconds is the clear and simple problem. Add to that problems of maintaining tapes, problems of migration between formats and problems of tape versions going out of date and it is a technology that a few love but many hate.

3. More sports broadcasters will be looking for the value than an active archive can bring.

An active archive adds value to an organization, making it much easier for broadcasters to monetize content. This is because it is much easier to find and extract at any given moment and it also enables automated workflows which make the whole process much more efficient. An archive at rest cannot add value in this way and purely adds cost. For example, a Swedish minor league football broadcaster now sells the footage of the games played by their rivals to the clubs for the purpose of analytics. Furthermore, old games can be purchased for viewing by fans. Although the turnover for lower league teams is fairly low it still funds the broadcasting and archiving operations.

Essentially, the right storage really depends on what your priorities are. If you need deep cold storage, LTO or optical disc archive (ODA) may well be less expensive. However, if you need instant or frequent access to your content, then LTO simply won’t cut it.

Jon Morgan is the CEO of Object Matrix.

BOSTON—As one of the nation’s premier public broadcasters, Boston’s WGBH-TV has a strong legacy of programming that it has provided to PBS and other outlets for decades. From the classic children’s series “ZOOM” to “Masterpiece Theater,” “Nova” and “Antiques Roadshow,” WGBH has enriched the nation’s library of television programming since it first signed on the air more than 60 years ago.

That program library contains thousands of hours of film and video in a variety of formats that has become increasingly hard to manage over the years, according to Shane Miner, senior director of technical services, who joined WGBH four years ago. Problems such as increasing rates of ingest, manual processes, no digital rights and inadequate media asset management led the WGBH IT team to search for a better solution.

“When I started, I noticed what I thought was an inefficiency around our archives,” Miner said. “It was too manual and we were going to struggle to scale as both the amount and size of media increased. I felt like it wasn’t providing producers with what they needed to be able to meet their shorter deadlines and quicker turnarounds.”

Initially WGBH looked into a cloud-only solution but found that it didn’t meet their workflow requirements because of long download times and egress charges for video became too expensive.

MANAGING CONTENT

The key to managing and maximizing the full potential of WGBH’s vast archive could be summed up in one word: metadata, according to Miner. This led him to consider object storage as a hybrid solution that provides the best of both worlds between a NAS/SAN and all-cloud system.

“You can’t find any video unless you have a good metadata structure to be able to search, so the idea with object store is that you can marry the metadata to the video as a single discrete object that gives you a ‘self-describing’ video file,” Miner said

In addition to enhanced search and retrieval, other advantages to object storage is that it is limitlessly scalable, and can be deployed in an on-prem and cloud environment. In the end this reduces costs by reducing the amount of time staff has to deal with physical media, an important consideration for a public TV station with a limited budget.

WGBH stored a large amount of its programming on LTO and the time consumed in accessing physical tape was a big consideration in cost reductions, according to Miner. “It’s a much easier process when it comes to people time and energy,” he said. “We don’t have to plan large projects around the changeover [from physical media]. Definitely object storage locally with the second copy in the cloud is cheaper than what we looked at over many, many years than a traditional LTO solution.”

WGBH’s current setup includes 3 petabytes of on-prem storage occupying 15RU in a data center that reduced physical space by 90 percent when compared to its tape library. It uses AWS Glacier for cloud/DR and AWS S3 for extra capacity. On-prem object store is based on the Cloudian platform that provides for editing and archive curation. Final versions are stored in Sony Ci.

DO YOU NEED A MAM?

Using object store reduces the need for a media asset management system, Miner said. Whereas search in the traditional archive was limited to just what was in the archive, object store allows content to be searchable as soon as media enters the workflow.

“What we’re hoping to do with object store is actually break apart the MAM,” he said. “Because we can store the metadata directly on the objects and then use the file system to search, you actually don’t need a big heavyweight MAM to handle all the processes.”

When Miner and his team were looking at implementing this new storage system, the station was in the process of launching its Public Media Management cloud-based master control system. Since PMM targeted centralized master control, the model lended itself towards more cloud-only storage since PMM only handled finished shows, according to Miner. For archiving, however, the requirements were different.

[Read: WGBH And Sony Partner On Cloud Workflow]

“The problem we have with our actual archive is that for example, ‘Frontline’’s hour-long show generates hundreds of hours of footage so storing all of that content becomes costly and cumbersome in terms of pull down cost,” he said. “So as we looked at the full archive, we’ll use Sony’s Ci to store our finished program material [for PMM], but that’s such a small subset of the actual full archive that it’s much easier to manage. But the two systems [PMM and the archive] are pretty disparate; central master control has its own archive of broadcast material that specifically focuses on master control and nothing else and this archive is specifically focused on WGBH and nothing else.”

Using metadata as the driver of the transition not only helps reduce physical space and the time station staff need to retrieve content, it also gives producers more capabilities in handling content through the production workflow. When you have archives that stretch all the way back to early Julia Child film reels, this illustrates how the massive potential of metadata can be used to maximize the value of such legacy programming.

“We take our archive to be our mission element,” Miner said. “We believe that maintaining our archive is a public good and that’s something we should do because it’s essential to our mission.”

WALNUT CREEK, CALIF.—The SXL-8500 series, a range of scalable LTO archive systems, are now available from XenData. The base model offers a 6U robotic library with two LTO-7 drives and 77 LTO cartridge slots that provide 462 TB of near-line LTO capacity. The unit can handle the addition of up to six 80 slot expansion modules to accommodate 557 LTO-7 catridges for a near-line LTO capacity of 3,342 TB, or can be configured with up to 10 LTO-7 drives.

The SXL-8500 systems run on a Windows Server 2012 R2 operating system but are ready for an upgrade to Windows Server 2016. The units can connect to a network via 1 GbE or 10 GbE ports for a network attached storage architecture configured with a network share. A system also features a standard file-folder interface to archive and restore files.

Cartridge interchange is capable by the system writing to LTO using the LTFS format. This offers functionality that includes seamless spanning of files and folders across LTO cartridges, partial file restores, automatic replication of LTO cartridges and management of an unlimited number of offline externalized cartridges.

SXL-8500 series models are compatible with a range of media asset management systems. They are also able to support XenData VS functionality, which includes the ability to retain files on LTO for a defined retention period, after which the content is deleted and the LTO cartridges are reformatted and ready for re-use.

XenData is offering the SXL-8500 series 462 TB model for $51,800.

TORONTO—Masstech’s range of advanced workflow and media asset management systems has added native support for LTO-7 compliant storage devices.

LTO-7 specifications support a native, uncompressed storage capacity of 6TB per tape cartridge, as well as increase uncompressed tape drive data transfer rates up to 300MB per second. LTO-7 drives are backward compatible with LTO-6 cartridges, and can read both LTO-5 and LTO-6 tapes. Content from older tapes can be transferred to LTO-7 with automated MassStore workflows. The MassStore platform provides direct, native integration with storage types, including LTO libraries from vendors.

Support for LTO-7 storage devices is available through a software update for the MassStore platform.

LAS VEGAS—Imagine Products will unveil Pre-Roll Post, an application that makes LTO tape archiving easier and more cost-effective at the 2016 NAB show. Pre-Roll Post automates the indexing of camera originals—including thumbs, proxies, and metadata—while backing up full-resolution media to local disk, LTO tapes or optical disc.

This cross-platform solution takes advantage of the open source Linear Tape File System format, which mounts a tape as a volume (hard disk) within OS X, making it possible to write and read from tape as if it were a disk, without proprietary software or formatting.

It enables users to create non-proprietary backups of any file or folder using LTFS, and streamlines the process of placing any file type onto an LTO-7, LTO-6, or LTO-5 tape, or onto Sony's Optical Disc Archive . As a hardware-independent system, Pre-Roll Post can be used with any LTFS-compliant tape drive or Sony ODA.

The 2016 NAB Show takes place in Las Vegas, April 18-21. Imagine Products will be in booth SL10827. For more information, visit www.nabshow.com.

SILICON VALLEY, CALIF.—Continuing to push the tape storage method, the LTO Program has shared the specifications of the new LTO Ultrium format generation 7. This new generation of tape storage technology more than doubles cartridge capacity from the LTO 6 and employs faster transfer rates.

The LTO 7 will feature 15TB capacity per cartridge when compressed and be able to transfer files at 750MB per second. Additional features include doubling of read/write heads in an advanced servo format, stronger magnetic properties, backwards read and write compatibility, and support for WORM, Encryption and Partitioning.

More information on the LTO 7 is expected later this year. The LTO Program has also released an extended roadmap to outline expectations for future LTO generations.

The LTO Program was founded by HP, IBM and Quantum.