Left on the Shelf!

One of the recurring themes in the conversations I have been having recently within the creative community is the slow, creeping demise of tape as a medium for content capture and the ramifications for companies who have, until recently, relied very heavily on that tape to serve as a back up. 

The more traditional workflow, as shown below, relies on the tape being ingested in order that the content can be worked on and then it is put on a shelf until it is needed at some point in the future.

This nice picture from an undisclosed location under London says it all (just one section of miles of tape in a maze of tunnels under the streets of London):

This workflow is cherished by the creative communities whose love of tape is steeped in the history and romance of film shot on tape reels. The reality of an on-demand world is that editors, producers and the population in general want their stuff and they want it now! Not very good if the clip you want is stuck in a vault hundreds of meters under the cobbled streets of London.

So now we have cameras that record straight onto disks or P2 cards providing those clips in an instant. Great.

Great that is until you are required to keep a backup of that original/master content. There is no tape to pile on top of the other tapes on the shelf. This very topic is opened up for discussion in a blog piece from the Television Broadcast Technologies Linkedin group.

Essentially the P2 card comes in, the data is taken off it, the card goes back out.

So now we have a problem. What to do with the masters? We cannot keep growing our SAN because it is hard to manage and prone to failure. A backup is required. The route most commonly taken that I have seen is to replace the tape on a shelf with USB or firewire drives..

Whilst this may solve a short term problem it does not resolve the issues of avoiding data loss and making your assets available for future use. These issues are mentioned in articles by Larry Jordan in his most recent news letter and Robin Harris over at zdnet.com …. both talk about the dangers of eroding drive magnetism if left powered off over long periods of time (on the shelf),  the message from both boils down to not trusting your data to a single disk drive

Ideally you should always have at least two copies of the content you wish to protect. Even if you have kept two copies of the data if you cannot find it, you do not have it. If you have numerous drives on the shelf it will be a nightmare to find the clip you are looking for.

Those new to the world of backup and archiving think it is best to bring the ‘best’ practices of the IT department in the creative realm. Throw an LTO tape back up solution into the mix and sorted. Tape as an archival solution is fine if the data you wish to put onto tape will not be required for a long time (if ever) and you have the in-house resource to manage its multi-site protection and migration to new formats.

Now if ever there were two groups of people destined to rub each other up the wrong way its the creative and IT departments. The IT guys want a process orientated, ticketed, SLA based approach to managing their customers expectations. The creatives want it f*&%$n NOW!

So if Giles the darling of the creative department says.. “I need the 3rd episode of Dr Who Series 3 by the time I finish my Manhattan” the probability of his request being fulfilled using an offline archival solution is at best unlikely..

To make those assets available to all within the organisation 24/7 then the tape runner, sadly, has to go.

Firstly you have decide what you need to keep online, which assets can your organisation can afford to put into an offline solution. For the assets deemed valuable enough to be kept online (that will be 95% in the case of broadcast/print/creative agency industries) a disk based platform as a nearline (or deep) archive is the most likely solution to go for. 

The ideal solution will manage the location, availability and integrity of your assets using non-proprietary tin thus keeping the costs down and allowing the runner to be moved into a more fulfilling role that adds value to the company and his or her CV.

There are numerous studies surrounding the pros and cons of tape vs disk archiving out there, we have touched on it in our blog (Building a Data Archive, Problems with TCO). Of course we have a vested interest in pushing the merits of disk-based solutions in this space. Disk yeah, tape booo ..

Nice Weekend..

Nick