Television commercial archiving and distribution company Datapost has successfully completed the roll-out of ADIC's A-MASS for Unix software and a Scalar 100 tape library. The solution, implemented by Smart Storage Technologies (SmartStor), was needed to assist Datapost in storing more than 11 000 commercials.
"Finding the right storage solution can be a difficult exercise when there is so much video footage to cache," says Stephen Ronald, director at Datapost. "As we could not save this quantity of data to hard disk drives, we decided to look for a bulk storage device."
According to Ronald, the production organisation thoroughly investigated the array of storage solutions available locally and pinpointed the ADIC offerings as the most cost-effective from a "price per MB stored" perspective.
"Pricing is critical in the video archiving game," he says. "Why pay R3 000 for a 50GB hard disk drive, when a tape library of the same size costs only R500. The ADIC products also assured ease of use, simple integration and rapid retrieval.
"Our new storage solution allows us not only to easily store new commercials as we receive them, but also to quickly retrieve them on request," Ronald adds.
Sanelle Moutsos of SmartStor explains that once Datapost's footage is digitised, it is archived by the A-MASS software, which also provides the tape array with the look and feel of a hard disk and allows it to stay online for dumping and retrieval. Users or applications can write files to, or read files from the library the same way they would with magnetic disk.
"A-MASS is ideal for the media world as it enables the easy archiving and retrieval of large amounts of data. Sometimes one file can be as large as 10GB, so a disk solution is far too costly for this type of environment," she adds.
Ronald maintains that Datapost's choice of implementation partner was also key. "We selected SmartStor because of the solid relationship we have built with them and their dedication to customer satisfaction," he concludes.
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