Finegold reveals that the company has also seen a trend towards multicloud storage. “Three years ago, it was an Amazon-only world. Then Microsoft started to push into media and we saw some adoption of Azure. Over the past 12 to 18 months, we’ve seen calls from our customers to support Google. So, it’s clear we're seeing companies move to a multicloud strategy,” he says. Companies are also operating their own private hybrid cloud solution, using on-premises objects and S3-compatible storage in their own data centres. This has led to a more careful consideration about the subtle economics of cloud v on-premises and public v private cloud. The new storage landscape isn’t so much a migration from one type of technology to another as it is an introduction of new building blocks. These take some expertise and strategy to get the most out of them. “Ten years ago, there was one type of storage – file storage kept on- premises. Now, companies manage complex storage environments from all tiers of on-premises storage to mulitple cloud providers. It’s a mess,” says Finegold. LONG-TERM THINKING However, not all storage needs to be agile. While media companies look for ways to make their assets more readily available across their organisations, they also have the problem of dealing with an ever-ballooning archive. When a production was finished 100 years ago, most of its assets went into the incinerator. The only thing that mattered was the final negative to strike prints – and in so many tragic cases, even those weren’t kept around for very long. After a century of trial and error, the moving picture industry has learnt to hang on to every frame and file it can. This has sometimes resulted in an
absurd swing to the opposite extreme, with companies storing countless versions of the same asset, sometimes across multiple locations. The efficiencies enabled by technologies, like IMF (Interoperable Master Format), have eased some of the pressure, but generally, media companies are loathe to part with anything they’ve paid for, no matter how peripheral it may have been to the final result. Spectra Logic has been helping media and entertainment with its long-term data storage problem for decades. Specialising in tape archives that can store huge amounts of data, the company has provided solutions for post houses, film archives, public institutions and major networks. The company ends up selling exabytes of storage every year (one exabyte equals one billion gigabytes – or one quintillion bytes). So, in an environment of rapid migration to the cloud, is there a place for tape-based hardware? It seems so. “We’ve found we’re busier now than we were even a year ago,” says Spectra Logic’s vice-president of product management and solutions engineering, David Feller. “Covid is actually going to have a positive impact on technology advancement. People are starting to ask, ‘What should my system be capable of doing ten years from now?’ and those are
usually the last things you think about on a daily basis. It's normally: ‘How do I keep everything up and running?’” The other thing that Feller has noticed is the industry’s sudden realisation about how important archive material is. “Production just about stopped in the media and entertainment world, so people are going back into old programmes,” he says. “The ability to access those efficiently is suddenly something they’re all really thinking about. And that is the business we’re in – not just how do you save things for long periods of time, but how do you make them readily accessible and searchable for users?” But Feller notes that storage companies now have to see how they can collaborate with other vendors and serve customers through a whole storage ecosystem. “Most companies that make a box or an appliance try to convince customers that the cloud is bad. Spectra is very different,” says Feller. We have a 20-year vision of what storage should look like for media and entertainment and how data should be accessed. It’s clear that the cloud is an integral part of that. Every company must include cloud storage and cloud workflows as part of their long-term strategy. Our goal is to make sure that it's part of a hybrid infrastructure.”
JUST IN CASE Spectra Logic offers the type of long-term data storage that has revolutionised how much
of assets are now retained
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