Releases

posted on 11 April 2008 15:41

Reading, Berkshire, 10 April, 2008 - Pharos announces a revolutionary new development in storage for broadcast content management with the integration of COPAN Systems’ energy-efficient MAID technology.

The combination of Pharos Mediator and COPAN Systems’ Enterprise MAID will deliver integrated disk-based archiving with the threefold advantages of higher access speed, greater reliability and lower power consumption compared with existing data tape-based robotic archive systems.

"The operational benefits of disk-based archiving have become apparent in recent years thanks to increasing storage capacity and access speeds combined with ever greater affordability. A disk-based alternative to data tape, like COPAN, may be a better solution for managing persistent data and where multiple versions of large files need to be stored for longer. This is typical in media workflows for broadcasters and service providers who are storing multiple versions of programme titles for compliance and promos for example. HD will increase storage requirements and the new delivery platforms such as Vod and mobile mean even more data will have to be stored," adds Pharos Director of Marketing, Russell Grute. 

Pharos Technical Director Spencer Rodd adds "Using COPAN's MAID platform, Pharos can now offer disk-based storage as an alternative to robotically-accessed data tape for near-line archiving. Tape cassettes and cartridges are subject to mechanical wear and tear, oxide contamination, tape tangling and snapping, head clogging and guide clogging. They are reasonably safe for infrequent-access archives such as low-stress data-backups in banking but not for broadcasting where the number of reads may be high.” 

Rodd continues, “Tape management can be complicated and costly. If a cassette or cartridge goes astray, there is no easy way of finding it again. COPAN's MAID performs automatic checks on drives when they are not being used. If a problem is found with a specific drive, an alternative is assigned in its place and the defective unit flagged for replacement. This self-rebuilding makes the system extremely reliable. Each COPAN shelf can accommodate 112 drives.  Using 1Tb drives this equates to 112Tb per shelf and when you consider a COPAN rack can hold up to 8 shelves this means the system will scale up to just short of 1 Petabyte in two datacenter floor tiles.”

“COPAN Systems is excited to team with Pharos to bring higher performance, and greater operational efficiency to broadcasters’ back up and archive operations. By implementing Pharos Mediator, a fast online server with COPAN's Enterprise MAID solution broadcasters can also meet the energy-efficiency targets they will be faced with in coming years.” said Mark Ward, CEO COPAN Systems.

"The COPAN MAID platform is fundamentally different from transactional storage arrays, in that it uses ultra-dense disk configurations enhanced using MAID technology. COPAN powers down disks that have no outstanding IO requests. This reduces power consumption by 80%, and lengthens the product life considerably. Our Enterprise MAID delivers the capacity, density and power metrics of a traditional tape silo, whilst delivering the performance, data integrity and ease of access of disk arrays.”

COPAN Systems is the leading provider of Enterprise-class MAID storage solutions that deliver the industry's most cost-effective solutions for the protection and management of persistent data. Purpose built for data rich organizations, its Enterprise MAID architecture dramatically reduces power, cooling and floor space costs in the data center. Expanding to over 8 petabyte (depending on data de-duplication) within a single chassis, COPAN Systems delivers unmatched density and scalability for large enterprise environments, including healthcare, financial, government, media and service provider industries. The company is privately held with investments by Austin Ventures, Globespan Capital, Pequot Ventures, Credit Suisse, Gold Hill Capital, Presidio STX, Battery Ventures and NTT Leasing Capital (USA).

Pharos delivers better workflow management to broadcasters and service providers in television, radio, IPTV and telecommunications. Pharos workflow offers greater efficiency for library management, ingest, quality control, storage management, archival, transcoding, post production and playout. Pharos solutions offer a next-generation platform to better manage multiformat content and enable rapid expansion in playout, presentation and publishing. Pharos software architecture, integration and support services enable disparate broadcast and IT processes to be unified across the enterprise.

 ^{[Formatted by Majid Soltani.]}