A service provider for post production and distribution services required a new digital media storage system to manage and service a major film library. They needed to be able to assure the film library’s owner that the content would be digitally stored in a non-proprietary, robust, reliable and accessible manner (Active Archiving).
Requirements
- Fast ingest (up to and beyond 20 TB a day)
- Fast access to files (no longer than several minutes)
- Long term durable protection (up to 30 years)
- Open technology (non-proprietary, no locking of data assets by the storage system vendor)
- Use of an open standards LTO tape format so files can be distributed on tape to the provider’s customers and easily read and copied
- Lower total cost of ownership (than an all disk-based system)
- Tapes can be removed from the automated tape library and shelved while continually being identified by the system
- Users-friendly operations (IT skills not required for any operational tasks including accessing archived and backed up files)
- A future enhancement could provide a disaster recovery solution with mirrored copies to multiple remote locations
MTMP’s Solution
The solution MTMP implemented is an appliance that presents NAS functionality to the users and to the applications. It stores and manages files on a disk cache and on an automated LTFS/LTO tape library. Files are initially ingested to the disk cache and then by policy automatically copied to one or two LTO tapes. After ingest, multiple copies of a file may exist (one on the cache and one or two on separate tapes). A policy determines how long a file remains on the cache or is stubbed to save disk cache space for future use. The appliance provided the typical user-friendly features that network-attached storage systems are famous for and provides a persistent index view of and access to all the files in the system (regardless of their age or where they reside: on disk, on tape-in-library or on tape-on-shelf). A platform with these benefits and functions is commonly referred to as an Active Archive.
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