ARCHIVING IN AN APPLE XSAN ENVIRONMENT

Executive Summary

The evolution of digital, tape-less workflows in the Media and Entertainment industry is causing a significant demand for ever-growing amounts of storage. Customers are facing challenges in providing sufficient storage resources to cope with the demand of new formats. For example, the amount of storage for one hour of Standard Definition (SD) content is about 72GB, for High Definition (HD) it is over 430GB, and for 4k digital cinema an hour of content requires over 4TB of storage. These are the requirements for the final product only, not counting raw footage, out takes etc. A typical movie production in 4k can easily span over 25 hours of raw footage, culminating in over 100TB of storage needed for just this one project, plus additional capacity needed for repurposing (DVD, online distribution), special effects, etc.

Transparent, intelligent archiving can help in managing the cost of storing the growing amount of digital assets. This is achieved through tiered storage architectures, where content is always stored at the most economic storage tier (such as disk or tape) at any point in time. For example – work in progress content would be kept on the fastest – and probably most expensive – primary storage tier, while completed projects would be stored on a less expensive, secondary storage tier for content retention and protection.

Quantum’s StorNext data management software enables Apple Xsan and Final Cut Server customers to lower their storage cost through tiered storage and data de-duplication. StorNext Storage Manager can also improve digital, file-based workflows by supporting a number of industry standard, highperformance disk systems and integrating applications that run on non-Mac operating systems. Quantum’s StorNext data management software provides Apple Xsan, Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Server customers with a solution to seamlessly upgrade their storage environment into a shared storage pool that supports third-party disk storage. StorNext also fully integrates Xsan clients with Linux, Windows and UNIX workstations and servers. At the same time StorNext provides customers with the option to lower the total cost of storage by introducing a fully transparent, multi-tier storage infrastructure, including multiple tiers of disk and data tapes.

For long-term content retention and archive, StorNext expands storage pools into multi-tier archives, automatically moving and copying data between different storage resources to reduce costs and protect content. Data location is virtualized so that any file can easily and directly be accessed by users for re-use, even if it resides on data tapes. Additional cost savings can be achieved using Data Reduction Storage (DRS), which provides content-specific data reduction using Quantum's patented de-duplication technology.

In this product brief we will explore the integration of heterogeneous clients into existing Xsan environments, enabling Xsan environments to support third-party disk products and introducing Intelligent Archiving for cost savings and long-term content retention in Xsan, Final Cut Studio and Final Cut Server environments.

StorNext data management software streamlines digital workflows and reduces data retention costs by creating a consolidated storage pool that multiple systems can access in parallel. This enables greater throughput and faster data sharing than is possible with standard network-attached storage architectures. StorNext also includes an integrated data movement engine that transparently migrates files between tiers of storage to reduce data retention costs and provide data protection...more

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