Effective archive solutions for broadcast customers

Lee Sheppard

Author: Lee Sheppard

Published 21st January 2016

by Lee Sheppard Issue 109 - January 2016 The long-standing partnership between Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, and SGL is key to the effectiveness of the content archive solutions that SGL FlashNet provides for all Grass Valley users. Today, the product integration between the two companies extends not only to the K2 SAN and K2 Summit production and transmission servers but also to the GV STRATUS media workflow application framework and production suite. This provides transparent access to the archive directly from Grass Valleys toolset.

GV STRATUS delivers greater workflow efficiency by enabling users to work collaboratively and accomplish tasks in parallel. GV STRATUS users need never switch to SGL FlashNet to manage their archive, search, or restore processes; the backend archive appears as a seamless extension of all Grass Valley environments. Even checking the status of a current request, or archive job queue is managed directly within GV STRATUS. The archive may comprise disk or tape storage, or a combination of these in an archive hierarchy, using rules-based SGL StorageManager to manage the data lifecycle within the archive based on size, type, content or age.

From within the GV STRATUS workspace, users can send single or multiple assets to the archive at once, and monitor the archive transfer queue. Transferring assets to the archive system can also be automated according to criteria such as the creation date, a specific custom metadata field (e.g. final master tag), a check box, etc. Once the high resolution content has been successfully archived, the user can delete it from the K2 storage (this can be a manual or automatic delete operation), keeping only a low resolution proxy copy and all metadata information within the GV STRATUS database. This allows users to search for archived assets and preview them before restoring the high resolution content from the SGL FlashNet archive back to the K2 storage for production. Users can also select in/out points from the low resolution content and perform a partial restore operation.

GXF and MXF files can be archived from multiple K2 sources, such as K2 production or online SAN, K2 Summit (production and transmission models) as well as K2 Solo. An elegant traffic-light display of archived and online content is provided within GV STRATUS.

The seamless integration of the GV STRATUS production tools and SGL FlashNet archive management solutions offers a simplified toolset with easy-to-understand workflow rules. Configured into a collaborative production environment, the workflows provide media organisations with all the tools necessary to plan, create, publish and archive their production.

Regardless of the size of your organisation, SGLs enduring alliance with Grass Valley and its commitment to effective, efficient broadcast workflows provides users with content storage management solutions that work, regardless of workflow or Grass Valley product.

SGL FlashNet is built around a clustered architecture, which allows virtually infinite scalability of the archive, from the smallest stations to the largest network operation. SGL FlashNet comprises three base modules, which can be run on a single server to provide cost-efficient archive operations in a compact installation. Alternatively, they can be installed or extended across multiple nodes to form a cluster that provides automatic failover and high levels of data throughput.

SGL FlashNets architecture also provides unrivalled resilience: in the event that a node fails, its duties are automatically taken over by other cluster members, without interruption to archive operations and without requiring any manual intervention.

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