44 ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE Rohde & Schwarz
BUILDING A FACILITY FOR EXCELLENCE The future of media storage may be on-premises infrastructures
ost supervisor 1: Have you heard about the new IT technology approach everyone’s switching to? It’s called HCI!
combination of redundancy and speed that is not easy to come by. For decades, on-premises systems have been compromised by physical hardware failures due to ‘hyper diverged infrastructure’ over and over again. Nowadays it is just not enough to install a file system over ageing third-party RAID technology. In order to ensure business continuity, dealing with the inevitable drive failures – for example – needs to be a matter of routine maintenance rather than a major disaster. “There are technologies that are available that can handle these type of failures and unify the file system with the underlying data redundancy mechanisms,” says Dirk Thometzek, product manager of storage products at Rohde & Schwarz. “This is where convergence begins, but systems like that are often at a bigger, data-centre scale, used for example in universities or for scientific research, where you have data protection measures like erasure coding and declustering.” This kind of integrated data-centre type storage has been rationalised by Rohde & Schwarz, adapting the technologies to create efficient and affordable storage clusters for the media and entertainment industry – it’s been doing so for 35 years. “There are many companies in the storage field who try to operate in the media business, but don’t have a media background and so don’t understand the nuances of how media works,” continues Thometzek. “Moreover, it takes a special kind of dedication to focus your efforts on an
Post supervisor 2: HCI! Wow! That sounds great! What does HCI stand for? Post supervisor 1: Hyper-converged infrastructure. Using one IT system for all our applications. Both: Sure thing… Ha, ha, ha! If you’re not ROTFL, then you’re obviously not a media and entertainment industry systems integrator. But at the heart of this tech-head joke is an industry truism about: 1. How companies can have the wool pulled over their eyes by jargon and hype. 2. How hardware without a plan can sometimes do more harm than good. HCI is actually a legitimate technical term for cluster-controlled IT systems, which indeed are made of many different IT devices and workflows, such as storage servers and the omnipresent cloud. The idea behind HCI is to increase efficiency of operation and so become much more cost- effective. Involving the cloud as a storage repository to an HCI approach rather than an on-premises storage system for housing and moving data is definitely a choice, but has been an overwhelming challenge more than some companies would like to admit. Let’s take a quick look at some storage technologies. A company that is working on high-value content – big, important files that need to move quickly – needs reliability as well as a
industry that demands very high performance but with relatively low volumes, but that’s what we do as media people.” While commercial off-the-shelf
hardware is becoming more available in this field, on its own it isn’t enough; you need the secret sauce to make systems work to the performance levels demanded in such high-quality media creation. The cloud gives the appearance of being a ‘get out of jail free’ card. Allowing redundancy, flexibility and access from anywhere, the cloud can often seem to promise an end to all storage headaches – as well as an offloading of responsibility. “We find customers have specific and serious concerns when it comes to their work – they’re dealing with important stuff, cultural content and entertainment, and quality doesn’t come automatically – you can’t just go buy a bunch of disks,” explains Thometzek, “You have to understand the pain points and adapt the technologies or develop new ones. Being able to do that well only comes with experience”. Rohde & Schwarz was founded 85 years ago and, as an independent group, is among the technology and market leaders in all its business fields. The broadcast and
THERE ARE SO MANY OPTIONS THAT IT’S REALLY CHALLENGING TO COMPARE THEMPROPERLY
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