Analysis

posted on 25 June 2008 04:44

Take a TV company, a broadcast company, any one needing to search old clips of video and use them to illustrate breaking news stories, a retrospective view, or spark new content - whatever, the creatives need it nOW!

And they generally can't get it. The Universal Studios fire earlier this month destroyed a lot of original analogue film reels. Some of it is stored in copies in a vault in the mountains but - get this - Universal Studios hasn't got a good handle on what it's got stored there.

These are media assets, rich media assets, with lots of potential value that is simply lost because either no-one knows it exists or it can't be located in time. Breaking news stories and illustrative video clip deadlines are ruthless. Get it for the deadline or forget it.

The tape method of storing video is self-defeating in a world where the creatives need it now or never. Camera people come in to HQ with the camera's P2 card or flash drive loaded with video. It's exported to tape and stored on a shelf, its value leaching away steadily as the organisation forgets what it has got stored and even if it knew would find it hard to locate.

The darn stuff needs to be in digital format; it needs to be online; and it needs to be findable - meaning stored with metadata describing it and a search function that can use the metadata. Since the creatives generally use Mac workstations it needs to be accessible in a Mac environment.

What you need is a Centera for the Mac world, well the good bits of Centera but not the costly, restrictive bits.

So we need a digital archive for Mac workstations, one that talks file store language like Macs do and not a special programming (API) interface exclusively that locks you in, one that preserves content with no risk whatsoever of corrupting it - meaning no hash-based content-addressable storage, one that uses industry-standard, commodity disk drives and doesn't charge an arm, a leg and an entire torso maybe for the privilege.

MatrixStore

That's what Object Matrix, a start-up based in Wales, part of the UK, provides with MatrixStore. This is software that turns a cluster of Mac servers with Fibre Channel-attached disk drives into a disk-based archive for digital media assets.

The cluster link is a pair of 1GbE lines. Object Matrix people have a lot of EMC Centera experience in their history and decided to store the files without hashing them because of the risk of hash collisions effectively corrupting data . They also use either Mac or, on a Linux version, XFS file systems with an FTP interface so that data can be accessed without MatrixStore software if required.

Typically Mac-using creatives will use Xsan as their main disk resource with MatrixStore being an archive resource for this. Tape could be used as the final resting place for data though, in which case MatrixStore would function as a nearline resource.

Data is ingested into MatrixStore along with metadata describing it. Both are stored together with the same level of protection; RAID 5 is the lowest level of protection offered and nodes can be mirrored to other nodes so that data is still obtainable if either a disk, disks or a node fails. Nick Pearce, an Object Matrix program manager, said: "We regenerate data from failed units in place."

It scales pretty linearly up to petabyte levels of capacity with each new node adding both processing performance and disk capacity. All nodes have access to the outside world and the minimum cluster size is three nodes.

Pricing is transparent; the software costs $1,000 per terabyte of data with the first 15TB free and the software license includes everything in the product: search; replication; data protection; Final Cut integration; etc.

MatrixStore has been designed for professional video and film production and fits right in with Apple's Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Server workflows. The latest 2.1 version product includes all the scripts and code needed to provide a disk-based archive right into the Final Cut Server environment. Entire productions can be archived with a single click.

Pearce said they were enthused about Sun's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) becoming available for Macs: "It will allow people to grow volumes. We'll be using ZFS as the file system under the hood. ZFS is very encouraging, especially on the Mac platform."

EO.nl is a MatrixStore customer. It is the third largest broadcaster in the Netherlands and has a 14-node MatrixStore cluster with 140TB of digital media inside it.

Another customer is AMV BBDO which is the UK's largest advertising agency and has a 4-node cluster.

The Key

What is the key thing that customers buy MatrixStore for? Yes, data in it is protected but it's not primarily bought for data protection. Potential customers probably already have an archive even if it is tape and not very searchable and full of lost digital assets which are, in effect, worthless. MatrixStore is a means of getting those assets on line and recovering lost value. Customers buy it because it turns their film stock, their media past, into a usable and re-usable online reference source for their creatives.

It enables film, TV and broadcast companies to produce better product and deliver it faster. It enables them, once their media assets are online, to keep them safe, accessible and usable. For these reasons, and because no-one else provides similar functionality for the Mac world, MatrixStore is a key, a key that unlocks lost digital media assets and recovers their value.

<sup>[Chris Mellor.]

Picture credit: Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times: Fire engulfs the Universal Studios back lot. June 3, 2008.</sup>