MONTCLAIR, N.J.—In 2015, Sony Electronics and Montclair State University (MSU) entered into a strategic alliance to give the school’s students, faculty and staff access to the same state-of-the-art Sony professional technology used by the world’s leading broadcasters—often meeting or exceeding the equipment standards students would encounter on-the-job. From switchers, servers and storage to projectors, displays and studio and PTZ cameras, MSU employs Sony’s solutions across our campus. 

TOUCHLESS MEDIA

One way we stay ahead of the curve and preserve our most important media is through our adoption of Sony’s Optical Disc Archive (ODA), which is critical to our long-term archival storage. We use Sony’s ODSL30M PetaSite, a scalable 30-slot master library unit to archive, safeguard and easily recall the university’s most visible live events, including graduation ceremonies, presidential addresses, theater performances and concerts.

We chose Sony’s ODA for our long-term archival storage because it is a touchless media, meaning the only thing that touches the disc during the Write/Read process is a laser light. Other archival options use a physical tape that touches drums and rollers and heads. This translates to less wear and tear and a longer shelf life.

Another reason why we chose the ODA system is because of its backwards compatibility. If we opt to buy a next-generation system, I can take my Generation Two cartridges and the system will read off of them. I don’t have to worry about making sure that I am transferring my old media onto new media to stay current, and the readers and writers are also compatible. That translates to long-term savings for us.

SIMPLIFYING THE PROCESS

In terms of workflow, we archive large-scale events and performances that represent the university. Once an event takes place, we can send the RAW files to the ingest folder. From there, Storage DNA will pick them up. We metadata tag the files for easy search, which are then sent to a cartridge into ODA.

Prior to adopting ODA, we were primarily using external hard drives. Using Sony’s solution is easier, faster and gives us peace of mind. I don’t have to worry about a hard drive sitting on the shelf for years and then plugging it in and hoping it works.

Additionally, hard drives are often not labeled and in order to understand what is on the drive you have to plug it in and check. With ODA and Storage DNA, I can simply search the metadata tags for the content I’m looking for and it will locate what cartridge it’s on.

This allows me to easily tell the system to grab a specific cartridge and export its contents from that folder back to our hard drive system, so that I can locate it and do what I want with the file. Previously, we were digging through hard drives or losing track of tapes and information due to personnel changes. With ODA, I know that everything that is important to the university is secure and easily discoverable.

Another benefit of ODA is its scalability. It’s great that we could buy a smaller base unit with the understanding that in the future, we can just add in more bays and more drives to expand and grow the system, which has less impact on our bottom line.

Between the purchase of the system, the cartridge and the backwards compatibility, we are confident it will grow along with our operations for years to come.

Adam Goldberg is Montclair State University’s chief engineer for the Broadcast and Media Operations for the College of the Arts. He has also served as the chief engineer of WMSC radio since January 2013. He can be reached at goldbergad@montclair.edu.

For more information, visit www.sony.com.

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.