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IBM AREMA, Tape and ATTO team up to Provide Flexible Digital Retention for Media and Entertainment

By Shawn Brume posted 20 days ago

  
Like many other industries, Media and Entertainment companies rely on IT infrastructure to grow revenue and control costs. Whether processing assets from production to post-production, producing computer generated content or preserving data, digital storage is a huge part of media essence management.
 
According to a park university study, while 61% of companies want to optimize data, less than half feel they are progressing. As content creation accelerated after COVID, Media and Entertainment (M&E) organizations found themselves drowning in data, data that must be curated and retained for posterity. While animation, CGI, AI content and standard production require high performance storage, the bulk of the data is or becomes infrequently accessed, or cold by industry terms. M&E has long relied on modern tape and linear tape file system (LTFS) to store data. The challenge has been integrating LTFS tape directly into the production process.
 

IBM AREMA combined with the IBM Diamondback tape library offer M&E companies the capability to accelerate production, automate workflows, and provide Media Asset Management (MAM) with the ability to fully manage digital content to low-cost digital storage. AREMA improves the agility and speed of file-based media production. Media asset management automates data curation while also providing access to time-based retrievals from physical tape, eliminating the need for multiple copies of data on high-cost storage. Integration of AREMA and IBM Diamondback provides up to 20.1TB of data throughput and up to 27.8 Petabytes of data in .76 square meters of floor space and energy consumption of less than 1kWh, up to 97% energy savings when compared to open Compute high-density HDD storage.




IBM and ATTO have also enabled a highly flexible M&E Infrastructure. Now all data assets are available across the Ethernet interface to multiple MAMs. ATTO XstreamCORE ET 8100T connects to the standard Ethernet LAN and bridges to SAS tape drives. All tape drives are now available to all servers over Ethernet. Eliminating the needs for colocation of MAM servers and Tape libraries. Tape infrastructure can even be shared over campus-wide distances connected via Ethernet.

 

Tape is the most viable digital media available for long-term provenance of digital assets. The days of storing canisters of film in dark rooms given way to massive amounts of content being stored on digital assets managed in a very similar manner as the film is. Tape has a media archive life of greater than 30-years3, and a media archive data durability of 17-nines4. Tape also offers AES-256 encryption of data on tape with zero performance penalty, protecting digital assets during production, post-production and for digital preservation.

  • Optimize tape storage architecture
  • Scalability in a flexible architecture
  • Eliminate single server bottlenecks
  • Improved production performance
  • Automated workflow
  • Reduced administration
  • Data orchestration
  • Media specific functionality
  • Low-cost, secure storage
  • Simplified storage support
 
Come and visit IBM at booth SL5616 to explore how IBM and ATTO can optimize your tape storage architecture. 
 

 
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