SMART ARCHIVE DISK AND TAPE LIBRARY ARCHIVING

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One of the most critical and expensive task of Tapeless Television is Digital Archiving System. For those broadcasters that already migrated to file based system it is well known how fragile Digital Tape Library System is, while demanding several efforts for continuous maintenance.

To streamline such a complex task, Media-Alliance integrated and/or developed scalable smart archiving solutions.

Removable Smart Archive Solution

The solution is based on standard PC offering capabilities to store/backup data over removable hard disk with docking station or stand alone LTO-5 Tape Drive.

For Docking Station we mean a simple device to temporarily support insertion and extraction of removable Hard Disk, as in the picture below and as better alternative to Data Tape:

Material will be archived “off the shelf” on hard disks or data tapes depending on selected solution.

After initial configuration to define folder creation and location, the archivist simply needs to copy or move the material to a predefined folder.

Following procedure applies to Hard Disk, but it is almost the same for data tape although data tape is not as efficient and safe as Hard Disk. The archivist takes an empty Hard Disk, labels it with name or progressive number and inserts into the docking. Soon after the archivist runs a dedicated application as below:

When the archivist runs this application, it lists all assets to be archived as coming from previous selection in the MAM.

With almost fully automatic process finally the archivist stores material on docking Hard Disk and MAM is informed of the new position of material since the Archivist has to provide the label indication to this application. Now the material is fully archived to “off the shelf” disk.

At this point all material is stored on external disks; however the users can browse any material with MAM using proxy/thumbnail/shots. Once the user finds some material needed for any purpose, user marks it to restore. To restore this material it is enough to go to Archive Station and run the restore application as below: