Video Edition

Description:

XenData's Video Edition manages data tapes on a Windows Server 2003 platform to create a high performance digital video archive. Available solutions range from offline video archives based on small tape libraries to fully automatic digital archives based on enterprise class tape libraries that scale to multiple petabytes.

The XenData software presents the managed tapes and a magnetic disk cache as a logical drive letter which may be shared over a network. Video files are written to and retrieved from the digital archive as though from a standard Windows logical hard drive.

The software supports partial file restore for all file types. When partial files are requested, the tape is rapidly driven to the beginning of the required section and only the requested fragments of the file are retrieved.

Hierarchical storage management (HSM) is provided, managing online, nearline and offline file storage.

Administrator defined policies support hierarchical storage management and automatic tape cartridge replication. They define file retention times on RAID, the specific group of tapes to which the file will be written, scheduling of replica tape cartridge updates, etc. see below:

On writing a file to the archive, it is first written to RAID. As soon as the file has been  written to disk, it is put into a queue to be written to tape. After the file has been successfully written to tape, it becomes eligible for deletion (also termed "flushing") from RAID.

A single server may have many different policies, tailored to the needs of the different file types that are being archived. For example, low resolution proxies may be permanently retained online but high resolution video files will be archived on tape alone.

When a file is held on tape and has been flushed from RAID, it remains within the Windows file system but with its offline attribute set. The Microsoft offline bit changes  network timeout periods to support the longer file retrieval time from tape.

The XenData approach to video file management delivers both high data integrity and high performance, taking full advantage of the attributes of both magnetic disks and tape.

XenData Software is tightly integrated into the Windows operating system kernel and is designed to deliver high data transfer rates. With large files such as found in digital video applications, many archiving solutions offer only poor performance. XenData software offers exceptionally high performance with file sizes from small to large.

Additional features of a digital video archive server based on XenData software include:

• Multiple Tape Sets - the Administrator can group related files together on the same set of tapes.

• Dynamic Expansion of Tape Sets - the system will dynamically expand tape sets to meet capacity demands.

• Cartridge Spanning - the system supports storage of large files across multiple tape cartridges.

• Offline Tape Cartridge Management - the system retains meta-data for off-line cartridges.

• Security - XenData software is fully integrated with the Microsoft Windows security model, based on Active Directory.

• Standard Tape Format - open standard TAR file format is used on the tape, allowing the tape cartridges to be read using standard third party utilities.

• Rapid file system recovery, in case of disaster