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Visual Impact / 422 Solutions         
      

LTO4 Package

Overview

Acquiring tapeless media has significantly increased workflow turnarounds within the film and television industry, however it has also opened up a significant risk which many are unaware of.

With a tape based workflow, rushes are always accessible as long as we are able to retrieve the original tapes, which can typically be left on the shelf for several years. With tapeless media, this type of workflow is not possible due to the high cost of solid state cards by comparison to tape stock.

Many facilities and production houses are backing their media up on external hard drives or larger storage devices. Whilst storage devices have become more affordable in recent years, active storage such as high speed storage and external disks are still quite expensive.

With a one terabyte hard-drive costing over R2000, that equates to approximately R2 per GB of storage. Whilst this cost does not seem too exorbitant, we need to couple in failure rates of hard-drives. Due to the way spinning disk hard drives work, storing essential data on hard drives for long term use is a recipe for disaster. Whether due to mechanical failure or a loss of internal magnetic polarity, eventually all mechanical disk drives fail.

Whilst RAID solutions are often able to provide us with a level of redundancy thereby spreading the risk - they are not a complete solution, and they are very expensive.

The best way to avoid data loss is by performing differential and full backups to a reliable backup solution, such as LTO.

 

Background

LTO has been in use for the past 10 years in massive organizations such as Banks and Insurance companies which have a legislative requirement to store all of their data.

LTO-4 is the 4th implementation of LTO Technology, and simply put, it is data tape. Rather than requiring a play-out and record method for backup as is the case with video tape, we are able to store and retrieve data to physical LTO tapes, similar to the way data is written to a hard drive with no additional re-compression or loss of quality.

LTO4  media is able to be stored on a shelf for 17 years without losing any data, far surpassing any hard-drive. It is also the most cost effective backup solution, with an 800GB  (uncompressed) tape costing approximately R600, making the cost per GB equal to 75 cents! A substantial saving when compared to hard-drive or BluRay.

LTO4 technology also has very high data rates, depending on the LTO4 device used and the interface it is connected with. The technology itself is capable of 120 MB/s, making it perfect for performing large backups of High Definition video.

LTO Devices are scaleable, dependant on the size and requirement of your business. Entry level LTO4 devices consist of a single tape loader, where the changing and labeling of tapes is a manual one.

One step up from this is the Auto Loader, usually rack mountable solutions, these devices hold several tapes at once, and are effectively an automated way of writing data to tapes, so that there is very little manual work other than the loading and unloading of tape sets.

The largest LTO device is an LTO library, this usually consists of more than 10 tapes, and some systems can hold up to 500 LTO tapes.

It must however be said that LTO devices are not as cheap as other backup devices, but using a simple cost analysis model* over a few years, we can begin to see how over time it is able to pay for itself.

This comparison also looks at 50GB BluRay, calculated where a 50GB BluRay has an approximate cost of R300, thereby costing R6 per GB.

 

 

External Hard-drive Backup Model
2.5 TB of Media per Month	Month 1		Month 6	Month 12	Month 18	Month 24	Month 30	Month 36	GB	TB
Drive Model - R2 per GB	R5000		R5000	R5000	R5000	R5000	R5000	R5000	90000	87.890625
Running Total Cost RANDS	R5000		R30000	R60000	R90000	R120000	R150000	R180000
Total Ext Drive Cost RANDS	Media		R 180000
LTO4 Backup Model
R0.75 per GB	R1875	R1875		R1875	R1875	R1875	R1875	R1875	90000	87.890625
Running Total	R1875	R11250		R22500	R33750	R45000	R56250	R67500
Total Cost of LTO4 Media	Media	R67500
Device + Software		R 42000
Total LTO4 Cost RANDS		R 109500
BluRay Backup Model
BluRay Model - R6 per GB	R15000	R15000		R15000	R15000	R15000	R15000	R15000	90000	87.890625
Running Total	R15000	R90000		R180000	R270000	R360000	R450000	R540000
Total Cost of BluRay Media		R 540000
Device + Software		R 6500
Total		R 546500

*This model is representative of a production company recording 2.5TB of media per month every month.

*This is equivalent to just over 40 hours of DVCPro HD 1080 material per month.

*Whilst declining media costs cannot be factored in to costs over 36 months, below average market prices have been used in calculations in an attempt to foresee this factor.

By looking at the above model, we can see that LTO4 has a 39% saving over Hard-drive based backup strategies and a massive saving when compared to a long term BluRay backup strategy.

 

To summarize, the facts are these:

• LTO4 is currently the most cost effective long term backup solution

 

• Backing up and Archiving to traditional hard drives is unreliable, and opens us up to potential loss of media.

• LTO4 Media has an approximate shelf life of 17 years, dependent on the amount of read writes.

 

• ANY DATA can be stored on LTO4, and writing data to it can in some cases, be faster than real time (certainly for Video formats such as DV, DVCProHD, AVC-Intra, ProRes XDCam EX, XDCam HD).

• LTO4 hardware and Software is supported on PC, Linux and Macintosh.

 

• Active or ONLINE storage such as External hard-drives, SAN’s and RAID’s are best used for Active projects, where the investment of these storage devices is maximized for its data rate and storage capacity.

Visual Impact and Marc Baleiza from 422 Digital Video Solutions have partnered on creating an entry level LTO4 package which can cater for both big and small business where reliable backup and archival is a requirement.
    
Date: 17 May 2009

Author: Marc Baleiza