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by Alan Hoggarth |
Issue 102 - June 2015 |
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Technology and profitability have
an intimate and often complicated
relationship. A new invention may
open up the possibility of new forms of
business, or greater efficiency in existing businesses.
Sometimes the invention may be a response to a clear
need necessity being the mother of invention. But on
other occasions a technological advance may have good
theoretical applications but be economically impractical to
implement.
The world we live in today is heavily dependent on
mass storage hosted in data centers where almost
inconceivable amounts of data are stored and retrieved
supporting the transactions that drive global institutions
and businesses and shaping the way we all live. This
change in the way data is stored lends itself to a lightsout
approach based on disks rather than data tapes and
the push for greater storage capacity and lower power
consumption has driven the development of very highcapacity
8TB archive storage disks costing less than the
equivalent in tape.
These developments have driven down the cost of the
storage and the data center approach has allowed
businesses to transform their operating methods, by
devolving their archive storage requirements to a cloudbased
model. The advantages of cloud storage have been
widely trumpeted, and any business today has to consider
the benefits it can offer. Fast, global access to data is
much easier with a cloud model, but the advantages
dont necessarily apply to all businesses, and media
organisations are a case in point. The reason is simple.
The requirements of an insurance company or an online
retailer making financial transactions for example will be
to store a very large number of very small data files. In
contrast with this, a media
business will typically need to store a smaller number of
files, but where each file instead of being a few kilobytes
is more likely to be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes
truly massive by comparison. |
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Having said that disk capacity is now in the 8TB range,
storing the files is rather less of a problem than uploading
and downloading them. This leaves media businesses
with a dilemma. Uploading long form content to the cloud
is likely to be affordable. Holding the content at rest in
the cloud will also be relatively affordable, but the costs
typically are much higher when it comes to downloading
the content, which is the principal revenue model for
most cloud storage providers. A further complication,
and cost, is the need for significant network bandwidth if
the download is to take place fast enough for operational
use, for example in a broadcast schedule. Bandwidth
equates to cost, which can make cloud storage less
attractive, but in many geographical locations it may
simply not be possible to provide sufficient network
bandwidth. So the strength of cloud storage is its ability
to store large volumes of media files very securely and
affordably, but the weakness is the direct and indirect cost
and questionable practicality of downloading them for
operational use.
Until recently, a media archive would have almost
invariably been on an in-house robotic data tape library.
ALTO is an alternative to tape, based on fully spun-down
high capacity disk storage and, like a tape library, using
2:1 or even 3:1 replication rather than RAID for protection.
ALTO also offers the ability to scale to a multi-petabyte
enterprise-class solution with ultra-low total lifetime cost
of ownership for broadcasters and media companies who
need secure and affordable storage. The two replicas
generated and managed as standard by ALTO are quite
commonly distributed over LAN and WAN networksbetween different sites, different cities or different continents
for multi-site archives, often with the third, disaster recovery
replica, on the shelf or some other secure location. So what
better location for the DR replica than the cloud?
With one local replica on the premises for fast and
affordable access, and a second replica in the
cloud for protection, we can combine the best of
both worlds. The replica in the cloud is never used
for operational purposes, avoiding expensive and
bandwidth-intensive downloads, but it provides the
ultimate security of an off-site copy of last resort
that can be used to create a new on-site replica in the
event of a media failure, an effective way to increase
both the yield and security of the on-premise storage.
This changes the equation for media organisations,
allowing them to harness the power of the cloud in a
smarter way to deliver tangible business benefits and
superior performance. The theoretical advantages of cloud
technology now have a practical and financially viable
application for long form media storage. |
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| Alan Hoggarth
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