Mass Storage Solution Required

Slaanesh

Hey peeps,

I am looking for a bit of advice. I am working for a company that has an extensive selection of digital audio and video. This consists of 30K+ mp3's and over 2000 videos. The storage requirements for these compressed formats isn't really that bad. The videos are MPEG-1.

However I have been charged with storing uncompressed versions of any new media added to the library. This will require serious storage. I also need to think about backing up the data.

What kind of systems are out there that cater for this kind of thing ?

Any info appreciated.

8T8

There are a variety of methods such as tape backup, DVD-RAM, RAID arrays etc it probably boils down to how much data you want to back up and how much you can afford.

If it's a lot of data & it needs to be readily accessible then perhaps something like a RAID 5 array would be best.

7aken

something like this might give you an idea of where to start looking

http://www.eclipsecomputers.com/product.aspx?code=SKT-N4100

for backup a raid setup would probably be the most efficient

Civilian_Target

What's your data retention time?
How fast do you want?
How much money have you got?

Lets face it, if access is rare and you're on a tight budget, you're going to want external storage: tape if you need to keep it for a long time, optical if you don't

But if it's going to be fairly regular access, and you have a decent budget, you're better getting a freezer-sized total storage box full of hard discs or something similar.

Slaanesh

The data will need to be readily available. I'm guessing the video will be stored in DV50, being native to Final Cut Pro.

We are trying to future proof in case we need to convert use different media formats. No point upscaling from MPEG-1 to some HDTV standard

Access time for video would need to be relatively quick, I'm sure 1gigabit ethernet would suffice.

I'm not sure how much money we got, but whatever we need we gotta pay !

andy1249

Sounds like this is business critical so you dont want to be messing around with any toys here , you need something from the likes of EMC or IBM , or some other major storage solution provider , most of these do cater for the small to medium customers now and should have something to suit every case ,

Have a look at this link, is this maybe the kind of thing you should be looking at ?

http://www.emc.com/products/platforms.jsp

Stephen

Sounds like you could do with a big fat RAID5 SAN. ($$$)

How many terabytes are you talking about keeping readily available?

Kali

RAID != backup.

For backup purposes look at something along the lines of a Storagetek L20 .. basically any tape library that takes LTO1 or LTO2.