HITS

For modern media organizations, the best archive solution is one that balances affordability with accessibility, according to Wasabi.

On-premise storage is too precious to waste on archival data, the space on which is expensive and highly in demand for performance intensive workloads. Meanwhile, there’s no easy solace in the cloud either because cold storage tiers hide costly retrieval fees and glacial performance behind low monthly rates, Wasabi says.

Low-touch media is typically not needed very often but, when it is required, an organization doesn’t want to have to wait several days to retrieve it.

The challenge for an ideal archive solution is holding all these factors in balance and creating an archive solution that breaks none of the following three laws: 1) per-TB costs remain low enough to justify storing large amounts of data for long time periods; 2) data must remain accessible whenever it’s needed; and 3) “retrieval must be predictable and repeatable,” according to Wasabi.

During the webinar “More Than Just Archives: How to Future-Proof and Utilize Your Media Archives,” on March 16, Wasabi experts discussed how to create an active archive strategy and assess real examples of customer experiences with varied archive strategies.

Noting that he started at Crown Media (now Hallmark Media), in about 1999, Mark Stolnitz, director of M&E sales at Wasabi, recalled: “I was brought in to build their internal post facility and then 20 years past as I evolved that ecosystem, built teams of amazing engineers and operators and  evolved the workflow through all the evolutions of technology in that timeframe.”

“So you’ve seen a thing or two, you’re saying,’’ Ben Bonadies, product marketing manager at Wasabi, said in response.

“I’ve seen a thing or two. Yeah,” said Stolnitz, citing a few of the things he’s seen, including videotapes, hard drives and cloud storage. “That’s exactly what we’re talking about today: Future proofing your media library.”

Content owners must “preserve media in perpetuity,” said Bonadies. After all, he noted: “Content is their bread and butter. That is their product. To not preserve it would be a waste of resources, of time and potentially lost future earnings from anything that content might generate in the future,” he noted.

Streaming services have become another way for content owners to monetize their content, Bonadies noted.

As a direct result of that need to preserve content, the volume of data is increasing overall. There is new content and data being generated each day and all of it needs to be preserved by content owners, including not only each title but also each version of that title, according to Wasabi. And the data is also growing to serve the number of new markets that are also growing.

The webinar then transitioned to discuss some history of the way content archiving used to be done and is still done: the practice of pushing local data to tape and then sealing that tape away in some far away, often underground, facility.

One advantage to that system is the content is extremely well preserved. Putting the data on a physical medium like tape is very durable, especially when you put that tape in “a cool, dry place, like under a mountain,” said Bonadies.

With cold storage, “other than the upfront cost of buying the physical hardware of the tapes, it is an inexpensive process and you can sustainably and scalably, if that’s even a word, store the content for long periods of time,” he said. But “this makes the content quite inaccessible,” he noted.

One additional challenge is that it’s “very hard to plan for” the cost of storage “because it’s all based on your level of usage and therefore hard to predict,” Stolnitz said, adding: “I know CFOs are not fans of getting invoices out of the blue.”

Bonadies went on to highlight the four key ingredients of any good active archive, saying it should be: scalable, searchable, affordable and accessible.

Concluding, he said Wasabi’s solution is “low price, high performance, secure object storage.”