solution to store 10TB /Month

I'm working at a small TV company. They generates 11TB of video files per month.

What can I do?. I just need ordinary SATA disks, in RAID. What solution should I buy?

(They are using a lot of Iomega NAS)

Solution 1:

Hmmm

"Expanded ad-infinitum" scares me. Do you really need every second of film online there and then? Can you consider tiered storage? Fast storage for recent/highly used stuff; slower higher capacity storage to stuff you need handy, but not snaps fingers right there; and lastly tape or something similar to archive old data?

As for actual options, what do your budgets look like? I'm going to suggest stuff from the Dell range because that's what I'm most familiar with, but all the top tier server vendors will have their own products at the same points but I'm not as familiar with those and you need advice, not a long list of drive models.

I like Dell's Equallogic range of SAN devices if you want to publish this data through more than one servers, and they come in a number of options that can offer you a fast storage tier and a slower higher capacity tier and of course you can buy a tape library of any size you like from Dell too for the archival tier.

If you only want to publish this stuff through one server then consider the direct attached storage option - banks of disks that can plug into a server. Again from the Dell range I know about you'd be talking about the PowerVault range

As I said earlier, I'm not suggesting you have to buy Dell, I don't work for them and I'm not shilling for them - it's just that we use a lot of their stuff and I know it quite well. You can look at HP, Sun/Oracle, IBM and they'll all have similar ranges of products at the same levels, and there are plenty of companies out there who specialise in storage too. But letting file usage grow without managing it like this is a recipe for disaster imho.

I know you're probably being told that they need everything all instantly available, and that you need to do this cheaply, I understand the pressures. But trying to manage data like that without a management strategy is asking for the moon on a stick and it just won't work.

Solution 2:

I work for a broadcast company and we will generate LOTS of video/audio data per month. Our solution was 2 Hitachi SAN, one faster (FC) and one slower (SATA) with lots of cache (256GB cache). We expect for it to exhaust in 3 years. Yeah, HD video is a bitch.

We have a management system in the works that will deal with all content life-cicle and moving it from faster storage (online) to slower storage (near line) and finally to be archived on tape (there's a lot of metadata involved to quickly and easily find the content on the archive later). We have a (expansible) 1000 LTO 4 tape library for archiving.

That's a thing that you should keep in mind. You really just need fast access/space to a determinate time of your programming. Say, the last month. That will be raw footage coming from news teams, recorded studio programmes, live show recordings, plus external productions (syndicated stuff, ads, etc). That is the content that will be going to the playouts and editing and for that must be fast to access (SAN connected to MACs where the editing is done, for example).

After the stuff is aired, you can (and you should) move it to a collection/archive (don't know the correct term in english), probably on tape. If a determinate piece of news, shows or programming is needed later, re-inject it to the faster storage for use and remove it after all is done.

Hope my personal experience helps.