Content Storage Trends for Media Creators & Smaller Production Companies

While the world is obsessing about AI, media creators are more concerned about storage capacity and bandwidth. Why? Because any M-series computer is fast enough to edit all forms of video – IF the attached storage is fast and big enough. Storage, not our computer, is now the performance gate-keeper.

So, I contacted Skip Levens, a member of Quantum Product Marketing, to learn more.

Larry: Skip, storage is headed in two opposite directions: on-premise and in the cloud. On-premise is secure, fast, private and sold at a fixed cost, while cloud is shareable and expandable, but costs are never-ending. Where should media creators be paying attention?

Skip: These questions feel intrinsically linked, given AI’s impact on workflows, so I have answered them as one. AI has caused disruption to memory, GPUs, NVMe flash, SSDs and even HDDs, and everyone, from independent creators to the largest content producers, is feeling the impact. The fast, local storage we once took for granted as part of regular content production purchases has become increasingly costly, causing a rethink of how content is stored and managed efficiently.

The best move now is for media creators to make their workhorse primary storage work harder and last longer. As the growing cost of primary storage makes repurchase inadvisable, keep your fast, expensive primary storage lean and optimized for work in progress, while moving archives and finished projects to more efficient storage such as object storage or tape. Unlike flash memory or other chip-based storage technologies, tape does not rely on wafer-generated components. It is also seeing historic levels of adoption and use, making it a smart technology to consider adding to your storage ecosystem.

Larry: What trends are you watching in storage?

Skip: There is a technology gaining traction called Time Addressable Media Store, or TAMS, first promoted by BBC’s Research & Development team, and now an open specification with a vibrant vendor community. Object storage is highly useful in context workflows because of its simple and robust approach to storage and retrieval, but when used in TAMS workflows, it unlocks new possibilities for remote and distributed productions, including multi-site and multi- source environments.

The concept essentially stores video and audio from any number of sources as small,
addressable chunks in object storage, thinking of each second of video as a separate object,
making the content composable and flowable. It’s an exciting concept that allows multiple
creators across different locations to deliver events and productions using robust object storage as the backbone.

We’ll be demonstrating TAMS on the show floor at IBC with our partner MoovIT, running on Quantum ActiveScale object storage, so attendees can see it in action. This is a developing trend, and I expect adoption to accelerate in response to ongoing supply and storage component disruption.

Larry: Why is there no affordable archiving solution for media that needs to be retained for decades?

Skip: This is an opportunity to reintroduce media creators to magnetic tape technology as a crucial part of a content archiving infrastructure. Tape has continued to innovate over the years, with each generation improving speed and capacity. The latest generation of LTO-10 drives can deliver speeds of up to 400MB/s and up to 40TB of raw storage on a single tape, making tape a compelling warm tier behind the lean and optimized primary storage mentioned earlier. Tape also offers other benefits, including cost effectiveness and low energy demand, a full tape library drawing less power than a single gaming GPU. For the most irreplaceable content, tape archives can simply be removed from a facility and stored offsite. Modern tape’s inclusion in tiered content environments means that media creators can be equipped with the means to ensure the right content is delivered to the right place, at the right cost.

Larry: Skip, thanks for your time.

A SIDEBAR ON LTO DRIVES

LTO drives for Mac are not as simple as Skip makes them sound. First, LTO drives are natively SAS, it requires an SAS to Thunderbolt converter – most often built-in – to make them Mac compatible. These converters are not cheap.

Next, new generations of LTO drives are released every 18 months or so. Each generation is faster and holds more, but each generation only supports the last two. This means that at some point, when you buy a new drive, you’ll need to copy all your existing tapes to the new format to keep them accessible. (Link for more information.)

Probably the leading supplier of LTO drives for the Mac is mLogic. But, they only support up to LTO version 8 (link).

OWC also sells LTO-8 and LTO-9 drives, but the starting price is over $10,000, with less expensive LTO drives no longer carried (link).

Yes, theoretically, tape is an excellent choice, but affordable LTO drives no longer exist on the Mac and are increasingly hard to get.