Digital Film & Video Archiving including 3D and Hi-definition Optical Data Storage

The large amount of data that is generated by these films must be stored and still be accessible for future editing and format changes that occur over the years. Old films were all shot with physical film and then stored in a metal case in a storage location. These physical film canisters degrade over time and films have to be "digitally re-mastered" as newer media comes to fruition. This is a very lengthy process and requires much time and resources. With today's digital video cameras capturing the action at a 4K resolution, film and video producers are able to capture an even higher resolution than was ever before captured. There is a large data storage requirement that goes along with this new process. The TBYTe^® provides an enterprise application server with up to 28 terabytes (TB) of online data storage and up to eight hot-swappable 6.25TB optical volumes for up to 50 terabytes (TB) of nearline data storage. The TBYTe^® is a scalable data storage solution utilizing hierarchical storage management providing online, nearline, and offline data storage capabilities in one solution.

The capacity of all types of media is ever-increasing, whether magnetic or optical based. The one factor that is still not improving with magnetic media is the long term reliability. Optical media has created a technology that writes data to a standard form factor disc that is in a metallic format once written. This provides the long-term data reliability that is needed for types of data generated that must be kept forever. Blu-ray is the current data storage technology but advances are being made in the 3D and high-definition arena which will become the new optical data storage technology.

3D and high-definition televisions are driving the need for increased capacities and changes to current optical data storage technologies. According to a 2009 press release, the Blu-ray Disc Association talks about how consumer demand for 3D high-definition movies will "Enable the home entertainment industry to bring the 3D experience into consumers' living rooms on Blu-ray Disc, the most capable high definition home entertainment platform."

Digital Film and Video archiving data availability and integrity is of paramount concern for the storage of virtually all long term data. IT administrators have long had to deal with the migration of data to new storage media technologies or new systems altogether because of the relatively short lifespan of those storage technologies. Hard drives have an approximate 3-5 year useful lifecycle and tape follows closely with 5-7 years of useable lifetime. The recurring shuffle of hard drives and magnetic tapes is now an issue of the past for the long term preservation of data with the introduction of high-density Blu-ray optical media and the TeraStack^® Solution. The short lifetimes of tape and hard drive media, due in part to their mechanical and magnetic nature, have resulted in the use of redundant backup practices to compensate for their shortfall requiring extra media, management, space, and energy. Blu-ray optical media data integrity is manufacturer rated for up to 100 years for write-once media and over 50 years for rewritable media.

Hie Electronics, Inc. offers the TeraStack^® Solution TBYTe 8.6.6 and the TBYTe 8.14.28 multi-tiered storage and application processing platforms providing a "data center in box" approach to critical data backup that can help alleviate many of the space, power, and cost limitations associated with today's storage environments. Whether a data storage technology refresh is necessary or some efficiency improvements need to be made, the TeraStack^® Solution provides a turn-key system that can help solve many of the problems associated with today's storage issues dealing with digital film and video archiving.