A service provider for motion picture post production and distribution services required a new digital media storage system to manage and service a major film library.
Requirements…
- Fast ingest (up to and beyond 20 TB a day)
- Fast access to files (no longer than several minutes)
- Long term durable protection (up to 30 years)
- Open technology (non-proprietary, no locking of data assets by the storage system vendor)
- Use of an open standards LTO tape format so files can be distributed on tape to the provider’s customers and easily read and copied
- Lower total cost of ownership (than an all disk based system)
- Tapes can be removed from the automated tape library and shelved while continually being identified by the system
- Users-friendly operations (IT skills not required for any operational tasks including accessing archived and backed up files)
- A future enhancement could provide a disaster recovery solution with mirrored copies to multiple remote locations
MTMP’s Solution…
The solution that MTMP proposed was an appliance that provided NAS functionality by storing and managing files on a disk cache and on an automated LTFS/LTO tape library. Files were ingested to the disk cache and automatically copied to one or two LTO tapes. After ingest, two or three copies of a file may exist (one on the cache and one or two on separate tapes). A policy can be set to reduce the size of the file on the cache to a stub to save disk space for future use. The appliance provided the typical user-friendly features that network attached storage systems are famous for and provided a persistent index view of and access to all the files in the system (regardless of age or where they resided, disk, tape-in-library or tape-on-shelf).