Broadcasters increasingly are moving to lower-cost disc drives and shared storage while solid-state flash memory is slowly gaining ground.
Broadcasters wanting the most cutting-edge solutions for digital video storage can consider solid state “flash” memory, yet spinning disk drives and digital tape remain the most cost-effective solutions for the majority of operations today.
“We keep a week’s worth of material online in a shared storage system,” said Victor Murphy, director of technology and operations at CBS affiliate WUSA-TV in Washington, DC, “but we’re still archiving on tape, and I’m not sure when we’ll migrate the archive to online or nearline. With budgets being what they are, we have to be very careful about what we choose as solutions.”
WUSA recently moved from Avid’s Unity system to an Avid Interplay shared storage solution, which stores one week of programming, interstitials and spots, Murphy said. “It’s very comforting to have such a resilient and redundant system in house, so I’m sleeping a lot better at night now.”
Murphy said WUSA is not looking at solid-state storage. “Flash is a heck of a lot more expensive than a RAID array, especially with spinning hard drives getting cheaper and offering more capacity every day.”
Cost is the key factor in storage choices, said Karl Paulsen, CTO of Azcar Technologies, a systems integrator based in Canonsburg, PA. “Recognize that higher costs means higher performance, such as for Fibre Channel disc storage with immediate access for multiple channels of ingest and playback.”
Paulsen noted that some storage solution vendors are focusing are internal applications and some on external, such as shared storage server networks for the main facility in contrast to small flash cards in field HD camcorders and trucks. “The main issue is getting all of the systems to operate together seamlessly within the context of operation automation.”
Paulson said broadcasters should not expect universal standards for video storage any time soon. “The technologies are changing too fast, so there is no market advantage on developing standards that locks everyone into one way of doing things.”
