[music] Hello everyone. Welcome back to All Roads Lead to Archive Qualar series about everything data and with media, entertainment, and broadcast kicking in most of that data as creative content. I'm your host Jeff Sangpiel. Today we're talking with Dr. Philip Story, the CEO of our partner, Zen Data, about the solutions that started them out, how those are still bestin-class today, and what new interesting solutions and partnerships they've been engaged in. Philip, thanks for joining me here today. Zen data's got a history that goes back almost to the turn of the century. We can say that now. Let's start off with the background of how you folks got your start all those years ago. And you know a little bit on your own background. >> All right. Uh hi Jeff. Benny. Thanks for the invitation. Um, okay. So, um, our CTO, Mark Broadbent, and I were over in the UK in a pub, um, on September the 11th, 2001. And we were talking about, hey, we've done with this.com era that was behind us, the craziness. We wanted to just use our expertise and start a company that was like solid um, solid products. um doesn't have to be uh VC uh accelerated growth and so on. Um my wife then called me, she said, "A plane's just gone into the towers in New York." And it was kind of wow, this is uh unreal. But then when we got to Mark's house uh and actually saw the video, it was shocking. Anyway, that was the day we shook hands and uh we have um kept the company private uh which has meant that we've had some real stability and um here we are uh over 20 years later. Um within about 18 months we had a product and um we were initially focused on um archive markets
in general and our whole approach was we want to use disk and tape and uh come up with a uh an archive solution. Now we'd already kind of done this before for optical disc. We had worked this was the third company that we'd worked together at and so we kind of knew what we were doing. Um but from a marketing perspective we had companies like um Dameler Chrysler as it was at the time uh Max Flack Flank Institute in Germany and so on. Um and then we had a first installation in TV station and we realized that we were such an amazingly good fit. Uh tape works really well with the large video files that you have in media and entertainment. And so today um all these years later we've got installations in 97 countries worldwide. Uh about 90% of those are in media and entertainment. So our customers range from TV stations. We have hundreds of TV stations. um through to uh big post-production companies um a couple of Hollywood studios um and then um we started to get um companies like Home Depot uh we started to get the marketing department of large corporations and and that's just continued to grow. So yeah, so and here we are um a little bit grayer, a little bit older but uh still addressing that same market. Excellent. And and I know corporate's become a a very large um upand cominging market for for a lot of us. >> Yeah. >> So um LTO's been a huge part of the company uh providing you know the media the and then your software and services. Uh can you tell me about Zen's work with tape and what you think the future is for the medium? >> There's the old cliche. I mean, people have been saying for 50 years the tape
is dead. Uh, well, it it isn't. Um, and um, for a lot of smaller users, most of our customers are like half a pabyte and above. Um, but for a lot of smaller users, like me personally, cloud is fantastic. Um, if you got a couple of terabytes of video, still fantastic. Now, you're probably, if you're on uh something like uh a Glacia archive type tier, you're probably sending your content to tape anyway. Um but it's hard to beat um an onprem um LTO based system. Now, you have to add all the stuff that we add to it to make it work really well. Um but um for all Zen data systems they have got a uh a diskbased tier and that disk based tier can be anything from a few terabytes of disk up to a pabyte of disk which is up about as high as we go. Um and what that means is that um you're writing to disk um and if you implement the way we've implemented uh when you're restoring it's just like you're reading from disk. It's just that there's going to be a delay while a tape gets put into a a drive and so on. So, a typical Zen data system um is going to be a um LTO tape library. We have more Qualstar LTO tape libraries amongst our installed base than any other brand even though we do support the other guys. and um uh and there's that that disc layer and um the kind of the core product has got a um file system interface. It runs on a Windows operating system usually Windows server today 2022 we'll add 25 next year. Um and it's just like writing to disk. You're writing to disk and you're restoring to from disk. And so that means that it's easy to integrate this into uh lots of systems. Having said that, um we've also got an API which uh will go grab content from some other
location on the network, move it to the archive and vice versa. And we also have an S3 interface. So if someone wants a private cloud or they've got applications that are writing to S3, then we cope with that as well. >> Awesome. I I keep hearing that as well. Isn't tape dead? I don't know. just just changed wardrobe and and its name and it it calls itself Glacier. So, it's [laughter] still around. You've got a number of partners in the asset management world now. Um, as well as a whole bunch that I would call the mini mamm space, which is the the part of the the tool set that connects onrem tier one and tier 2 storage directly to tape via your tools. And this touches all sections of media broadcast live and in addition to the expected post-production and uh workflows. >> And how do you see those partnerships as um you know a future for um growing that part of the ecosystem? So, so um when we started the business back in the early days, we realized the importance as soon as we kind of decided to focus on media and entertainment, we realized the importance of integrating with the various MAMS that are out there. Um and uh there are various ways for the integration to occur. It can just be simply writing to the file system that we present or it can be using the API that moves content from uh to give it its official name shared disk storage either storage that gets used often for editing and for very fast access. Um so what am does is it will bring all of those together. It will allow you to search for your content no matter where it is whether it's on the archive or whether it's on that uh
shared disk storage. Um and we work with many many different uh media asset management uh providers. um we we first of all um added support for object storage as a destination. Um so you can take a um I'll give you I'll give you a story. Um it's a very well-known TV station based in New York um national TV station and uh they first became Zen data customer um way back over 10 years ago. Um they um were storing everything on LTO. They were replicating and uh producing two copies. So that was their extra u data protection. And uh then COVID came along. No one wanted to go into the center of New York into the center of Manhattan. And there was a need for someone to take these tapes out from time to time. Um so by then we had developed this um we call it cloud file gateway extension and basically you add it to your existing LTO system and you um have that as an alternate destination. So what they do is they stopped producing the replica tapes and they just uh their primary archive is LTO. Um they uh write to it uh immediately. They can restore from it with a one or two minute delay. Um that all works great. In addition, they put a copy into the cloud and they can uh move that to a relatively low cost tier. Um to be honest I can't remember whether using AWS or Azour but they move it to an a tier that um basically isn't immediately accessible but it gives him that that extra copy. So that was um object storage at the destination at um uh level. More recently, well maybe five years ago, um we added the ability to have an alternate interface um to the file system interface. So here you can now write your archive as though
it's uh S3. So it's make turning it into a private cloud. Um so we have uh S3 at actually both both ends of the system and it's just one of those requirements. You just need to have it. >> Understandable. So along with those attachments that get into AWS and Azure um part of that ecosystem are the folks who are doing media life cycle in the cloud. Uh I know you recently announced a partnership with the the folks over at Iconic. Uh and you seem to be an excellent bridge for those cloud centric tool sets to get them to an on-prem archive at the end of the end of the life cycle for the media. How has this evolved both technically and in terms of market demand for this type of migration of completed assets back to onrem? >> So um as far as iconic is concerned I mean that they're basically a media asset management system that runs in the cloud and um for them like the natural um way to go is to use cloud object storage. The problem with that is as soon as you're up at that half pabyte, one pabyte level and beyond, it starts becoming super expensive. Exactly. Um and so um this is a a large uh the the first installation for this is a large um TV station on the west coast of the states and they were attracted by um having their mom in the cloud. It basically means it's great for their remote workers, but they didn't want to have to go through the a the expensive process of migrating their content to the cloud and then the every year super expensive uh fees associated with it. Um so um here we have a module of software now that integrates with iconic and allows the content uh which is on prem on LTO tape libraries uh to be accessed. >> Excellent. I mean, and I've seen a lot of the a lot of the asset managers move
to Iconic [clears throat] was really kind of the trailblazer to move to that sort of concept where they're in the cloud and they can look at everything. Um, but there there's still lots of stuff in gatewaying down to onrem. >> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting that um the cloud is much more prevalent in the US um than outside of the US. there are so many of our customers are saying no absolutely not. Um but that that's just a different story between those two geographies international versus domestic. Yeah, I've heard that a lot that a lot of a lot of folks who are in Europe who do have data in um hyperscalers are are quickly trying to pull that out and put it on prem in some way, shape or form today because of you know concerns about >> um IP [clears throat] and politics and and just the simple cost. Yeah, >> exactly. And for us, it's just something that's um because we have so many customers that have been with us for more than 10 years. Um they migrate the hardware, they migrate to later generations of LTO and it's and when are you asking the question, have you thought about the cloud? It's like absolutely not. No way. Sure. Sure. Ah right. Um you see uh Med Entertainment and AI are actually a nice marriage. Um so um actually I was in Europe a couple of weeks ago at a conference and um there was a presentation from um from Reuters and Reuters has got so much content um the example that was given is um I think it was it was it was in I think it was Cape Town. certainly in South Africa and
they're moving office and oh they they've got cupboards and metal cupboard after metal cupboard full of like videotapes not data tapes videotapes and they don't want to lose it and when they were drilling down they had some amazing footage fantastic stuff really historically important um so they're converting all of it now what they have is on the vide tape they have maybe six words and that tells them what's there. Um, so there you've got an archive and you just don't know what it is and it's going to be all sorts of diverse content. Um, so using AI to be able to search for that is like is is like the trend as far as we're concerned and it's an area which we're going fast into. Um, so you want to be able to first of all you need to orchestrate restoring that content in a sensible way. Uh, if it were in the cloud and it were say on a glassier or whatever, you want to be able to being restoring that in a way that isn't going to incur extraordinarily uh, high fees. Or if it's on tape, you want to be able to take the content in tape order and so on. So there's orchestration of that. you then need to feed it into uh an AI engine that is going to be able to do uh the likes of uh speech to text, facial recognition, scene recognition, logo recognition, etc., etc. And um and so being able to pull that high-res content back, pass it to that AI engine, and then get the metadata. And that then that metadata then allows you to to search. [clears throat] And when you're doing this on a pabyte scale, uh it needs to be well optimized. >> It it does. The other thing also I'm hearing is what what folks will do is they're going through that same process, but in the middle they do a transcode to
proxy. >> Oh, sure. >> It's a very thin thing put in the cloud. Yeah. um >> because they don't want to a lot of times folks are using the cloud to allow them to gain those AI insights and they can do that with a proxy file which is this big compared to this >> right but what we're also finding is that if you do that with the original high-res you get a much higher quality um so just imagine facial recognition you've got 20 people in the scene if you've got a low res proxy you're not going to get it. So, there are two schools there. Um, so I I agree with you, but not always. Sometimes you need that high-res content, too. >> Yeah, it's content dependent. Um, and the other thing also, you know, I've heard a lot of is, you know, say you've got an entire library living on D2. Who has D2 decks any longer? I know the archive people do. I know I know lots of people living in that space, >> but you got to get that stuff out quickly cuz you know a couple years ago I heard that there's only a certain amount of videotape head hours remaining to get content onto or out of out of those tapes and after that point they're that that's it. They're just abandoned and no one can get anything out of them. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um so even though it's like a legacy issue, this is growing as a business um because um more and more organizations are realizing that they've got this content that is going to disappear if they don't do something about it and they realize how valuable it is. >> Yep. And some some content is just
valuable in and of itself for what it was originally. And there's a lot of content out there that was it was discarded. It was, you know, as what people would say, oh, it's on the cutting room floor. If you got a reality TV show that shot 5,000 hours of of shoot to one hour worth or 42 minutes worth of worth of show, there's a lot of stuff that no one ever saw. And that's still available. And in theory, you could take all of that and craft that into entirely new stories about, you know, these reality characters from years ago that you would have never had insight into. >> Yeah. I don't know whether you know, Jeff, but um we have a joint installation um in Europe. It's uh RTV Slovenia and RTV Slovenia. So, Slovenia, small European country. Um and um the audio video archive, the biggest by far is the one like nationalized TV station RTV Slovenia. Um so um they're using our joint product Zen Data and Qualar in their production area. Great. Um, but they're also uh have this massive project uh called MediaTek and uh they are taking all of the audio from the RT I guess it was not RT it was just R then wasn't T um the R SIA uh radio station from 1920 something and they have basically taken these magnetic reels and they've converted all of that that's uh they need they want they wanted to have fast access to it. So they've got three or 400 terabytes of disc all backed up by tape. Um all of their videotapes they've converted all of those um and that is many many pabytes and they're now going back to film and they have little bunches of films and they're converting them. They've probably got another 10 years to go but it's like national heritage. It
is the record for the country. Um and uh that's like an amazing project. >> Yep. And and the the thing is it it resets the life expectancy of what's now the data. Um a lot of times you know we we have the world always thought that oh film is a hundredyear medium for storage and then the universal archives caught fire you know 101 15 years ago. Yeah. >> And all sorts of tape and film was lost forever. And the other the other piece is, you know, I hear about archives that are stored in cardboard boxes um on on tape less than a mile from the Pacific Ocean. They're probably gone. They're they're they're just they mold will have gotten to them. There are physical factors that get to these things. So >> getting them into a digital realm to allow the the data to have its new rebirth of life cycle is is perfectly >> perfectly the best thing to do, I think. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. >> Excellent. So, Phil, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us today. Um, look forward to great partners, future partnerships and products and workflows. So, everyone uh you know I'd love if you could like and subscribe uh as we have all sorts of interesting things coming up on all roads lead archive. And uh just a shout out thanks to Avid Technology pro for providing the editorial platform that we use. Hope everyone enjoyed today and look forward to seeing more.