12 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
THE DRIVE FOR TOP STORAGE electing the right storage technology still comes down to careful deliberation and considered business strategy
Words by Phil Rhodes
nternet video distribution has long since beaten the technical quality of broadcast TV. The network shifts masses of data faster than most
Until recently, the only way to store that sort of data was on a bank of hard disks in the same building – if not the same box – as the computer doing the work. And throwing commodity hard disks in a RAID enclosure is still a cost-effective approach. Companies like G-Technology offer devices designed to do that off the shelf. For under £600, a G-RAID II storage system provides 12TB of storage and can achieve over 400MB/s while still remaining portable enough to take on set.
Choosing the right backup option can be challenging and sometimes there’s no simple choice. Camera cards are too expensive to keep on the shelf for months, offloading can be a pressured rush that can’t delay the shoot and shoots may happen miles from a fast network connection, making online storage unreliable. And no matter what the storage medium, reliability is crucial. The first instinct is to specify a RAID, but it’s not quite that simple. A RAID of many disks might survive the failure of any one, but it’s still one RAID, with single points of failure. It will also carefully preserve human errors. RAID is not backup. LTO tape, on the other hand, is backup. Two copies on LTO and one on disk will make most insurance companies happy. LTO drives come in internal or external formats, mainly for on-premises backup of bulk data such as video files. The latest LTO-8 drives, made by Quantum, HP and IBM, achieve 360MB/s onto 12TB tapes and sell between £4000 and £6000, depending on the configuration. LTO-8
satellite or broadcast channels, and laptops, phones and even modern TVs have lots of processing power and can be updated to handle new codecs. It sounds great, but all this quality means the sheer amount of data involved in producing content can be huge, even if the project is not for a traditional distribution channel.
THE IT CLOUD Zoolz’ AI-based BigMIND cloud backup service
provides intelligent search and content recognition
feedzinesocial feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook