XenData has added a Media Portal viewer to its on-prem and public cloud tape archive library so users can see previews of archived image and video files to select content for restoration.
The company builds the X-Series tape archive products, which have a front-end RAID disk cache. Previews, also called proxies, are low-resolution versions of the media file. They are created and written to disk when a media file is initially archived. XenData also supplies fully disk-based E-Series archive products. These scale out from one to four nodes, each with 280 TB of usable capacity. The Media Portal provides fast access to previews of archived files on tape that are otherwise slow to access and view.
XenData CEO Phil Storey said: “The Media Portal provides an excellent way for a user to know what content they have in their media archive. It is not a Media Asset Management system, but it provides a simple interface that provides the functionality that many of our users want.”
The Media Portal for Cloud runs on a physical or virtual Windows machine with a gateway to one or multiple public clouds, including AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, and Wasabi object storage. It displays previews of all video and image files written via the gateway, including files stored on offline storage tiers such as AWS Glacier and the Azure Archive Tier.
The X-Series archive products can store offline cartridges externally as well as internally in the library racks. The Media Portal provides previews of all such external video and image content, together with the cartridge barcode information, which informs the user which LTO cartridges should be imported back into the library to be able to access the required content.
The Media Portal is sold as a software subscription and pricing starts at $980 a year. It will be available from May 2024.
