Howdy everybody. I'm Jeff Sangfield with Qualstar. Welcome to the first in the series of all roads lead to archive. Let's start with the what first. Linear tape open is the name known as LTO to its friends and was introduced to the market in the year 2000. Now we've been using magnetic tape as a storage medium for over half a century now. This is half inch tape. When you see historical computer archives with those big reels of tape spinning back and forth, half inch tape helped us get to the moon. Half inch was the form factor of beta and VHS and we used variants of that to keep archives for decades and that was the how back in those days. We inherently created our archives first while we recorded. Roll tape meant the archive was being made as it happened as the production was happening. Today LTO is the archive just not made as the way of the primary audio and video capture any longer. It contains files. It's the digital data instead of the analog and then later the digital video signals recorded linearly. The why LTO makes the best practice of 321 storage redundancy incredibly easy. Three copies, two different types of media, and one set of backups that's offsite. It's easy to achieve with a second set of tapes, duplicate them, and a FedEx or UPS shipping air bill and out it goes. LTO has usually con considered to be cold storage with a few special exceptions and has the lowest cost per gigabyte for storage really that can be had today when you consider the total cost of everything. The physical tapes, we're now at Gen 10. That's 30 terabytes uncompressed at 400 megabytes a second. Gen 9 is 18 terabytes at 400 megabytes a second. Gen 8 is 12 terabytes at 360 megs a second. On the deck side, the
deck is what you use to record. There are singles, there are libraries, and there are libraries with multiple slots and decks. And then there's upgrade or replacement decks for those libraries. How they're going to attach to the initiator. More on that later. That's the physical connections. There's going to be Thunderbolt out there. There's SAS at 12 gigs. There's 10 gig Ethernet, there's fiber channel, and historically an LTO deck will typically read the two previous generations of LTO. That's where some of the extra cost begins to creep in. Just because I can go get a cardboard box full of VHS tapes from my public storage locker, it doesn't mean I really still have access to all that media there. I don't own a VHS deck. Can't put it into anything. LTL is the same way. When you move up generations, you may need to repack or put your data on the new tape format that's available because you don't have anything to play the old tapes. Also, like any other physical medium, how you store those tapes determines how well they're going to age. Metal storage locker with a cardboard box full of tapes in a non- temperature controlled environment. Then the same box pulled out of that in the Midwest and then brought to California where it's extremely hot. Well, M's not going to fare that well. Mold likes magnetic tape formulations, by the way. So, 30 years is certainly possible to keep LTO archives, but you're going to need to have them stored in a way that follows best practices. Onto the libraries or the autoloader front, we have the entire Q series of libraries. What's important here is the number of slots versus the number of decks. Think of a library kind of like a five disk CD changer. It's easy to keep
more of what you want available on the system for longer. More decks that gives you a higher throughput when pushing to tape. You can write more than one tape at a time. And it would be great to be able to read from one tape while writing to another. Certainly possible with a library. There's also tape as object library systems that are out there. These are designed to be deep archive in cloud and data center environments. They come with enormous capacity and are geared to be the coldest of cords cold storage tiers. They can get up to exabyte level scaling. If you need cloud provider scale for your LTO, LTO can get you there. Concepts such as LTO as object and tape as a service are part of the tape ecosystem. When you get to that scale management, the where your head your spreadsheets you show 12 is on a particular camera card and it's on tape L10 XXX. So you know that your project backups for your NLE are on a completely different tape series altogether. If you're cycling through shows that don't you don't own, this becomes a lot easier as you flush that material out and then write over entire tapes. It's difficult for a large operation or in finding that single file. And if you or that other person who's in charge of managing it in their head gets hit by a winning lotto ticket, all that information goes out the door. See you. This method is usually drag and drop copies to an LTFS tape mounted on your desktop. What about verification? LTO backups have used hashes of data like MD5 to ensure that data is archived and can be verified anywhere down the road in the data life cycle. There are applications that simply create comparative hashes, but any of the DIY workflows aren't necessarily elegant or
automated. So there are applications out there that are designed for data backup. They're not mediacentric, but made to just back up stuff because 20 gigs of spreadsheets and text still equals 20 gigs of AR raw original camera files. But you're not going to have any information on the metadata for that material. You don't know what the media is about. And for media, just beyond simple restore it all workflows, metadata really rules it all. So folks that live in that space, retrospect convolt, they work perfectly fine when you need to push data without having to know what it's all about. It's a backup from Thursday. Cool. There are applications out there that are designed for onset dailies management things like yo yata, palm for silver stack. They're designed to work with LTFS mounted LTO's to keep track of what's there. They also have an whole bunch of other capabilities. Asset retrieval be a EDL, XML or AAF as a selective restore or depending on the file type, even a partial file restore. Pretty cool. Who wants 30 minutes of file for 20 seconds of media? Get me what I need, please. Advanced features like transcoding, color pipelines, and and asset management or multil options for migrations are available at scale with these solutions. very resilient in singlethreaded workflows. So applications that come with or can be packaged with a tape library or end up being packaged as part of a primary spinning disc shared storage setup. That's a mouthful. Zen data and CATV are some of those that live in that spinning disc agnostic space. What's that mean, Mr. Wizard? So it it means that they work with just about any spinning disc file system with a few exceptions.
There's an interesting bridge between software designed to manage the library and software made to engage with the rest of the storage ecosystem, asset management and the like. Typically, these platforms are going to run on additional compute hardware that may end up being task specific. That makes them similar to the onset daily style of workflow, but they end up being faster because they're multi-threaded. They can get a lot more media through the pipeline because they're doing multiple things at the same time. So there's gateways, there's a front end front-end caches for LTO that allow it to quickly clear more expensive tier storage and integrate into existing tool sets with panels that can be opened in the editor, engage with asset management systems for back-end workflows. And then coming up strong are LTO management tie-ins from shared storage providers. Like I mentioned, the folks from Metachare, Facilus, uh, Studio Network solutions all have recent or new ties to archive storage, which LTO is a huge part of. These solutions are also beginning to migrate to onbox, which is exciting. I guess that makes me a storage nerd. Oh well. applications that are standalone and are custom made for archive management and data movement in this space are SF archive from SFS media Qstar uh arywires p5 even catv there's pixto stores ingenia and storage DNA's fabric these tools are usually hardware agnostic they're made to work with any size qualar library or in some cases libraries as they are also data movement methodologies. So they end up having a lot more insight into your media life
cycle. They end up being able to orchestrate data movement between tiers and then out to tape. Some of these tools are also asset managers in their own right, but all are able to with APIs and other tools to allow them to fully integrate into a media infrastructure. And if the APIs aren't quite where they should be, there's some things out there that I I like to call digital cartilage, like KIB, QIBB. When every part of the media supply chain is informed as to your media status, the whole business is going to benefit. Orchestration in an entire infrastructure allows very easy engagement with new workflows and it lets the metadata remember metadata is king and information become available not only for the creatives but for the whole business itself. So that brings us to the second part of the why for LTO in media. Many feature films and episodic TV series follow a very standard practice of on set they create two LTO tapes and then they send one to the finishing house that will end up handling the creation of the final show from the original camera masters or pulling shots for visual effects. Then a whole other set is sent to the other side of the country or sometimes the other side of the world. It's done as very simple insurance. Since the production cost of media is so high, the small spend to keep an extra copy well away from the primary one gives the productions insurance and bonding companies security that the media will survive even the most destructive of events. And this is just what they do with their media. They own that content. When the content is not yours to own and you're simply involved with the process on the creative side, the security of a
tape archive lets you sleep a lot easier at night. One sprinkler system leak for your facility. It doesn't have you on the hook for millions of dollars worth of lost investment. So 321, it's where you want to be. An LTO is the best return on that archive investment. And LTO spells Qualstar. Qualar has been securing data and good night's sleep for techs and creatives for over four decades. And that's the how to get this done. It will make your accounting peeps very happy as well. Getting that total cost for backup and archives down to a sensible price point again. And where the cost to retrieve data, well, no, there is no extra cost. You have it. It's with you. Opex, capex, it's still money you got to spend. and not having to spend so much right now is better on the cash flow. If you've got questions about an LTO workflow, please pop them into the comments below and we'll try to answer them quickly for you. And when you're ready to get the best least cost archiving for your workflow, check us out at qualstar.com or email sales@quallstar.com. And while we're just getting started here on the series, I'd always love a like and subscribe. Again, I'm Jeff for Qualstar. And until next time, stay safe.