Cache-A Featured User Report

Friday Productions chooses Cache-A to preserve
Half-Pipes and Pearls for Posterity

When content is king, a good archiving system needs to be a fortress to keep data safe and secure for decades to come. With that in mind, Brighton, U.K.-based Friday Productions moved from a less-than-perfect disc-based system to a Cache-A digital tape-based archive solution.

As a busy and rapidly expanding company, Friday had amassed a great deal of content on external hard drives, which was proving costly as a method of archiving. "At around $160 per drive, they were too expensive to keep sitting around on a shelf," said Emma Smith, Managing Director, Friday Productions. "It just wasn't an option to keep expanding our fast storage." Content security was also a major consideration. "We were aware that content saved to disc was not entirely safe, having learned the hard way when we lost some data – thankfully nothing too important – but we couldn't continue to risk it," she said.

A chance meeting with Global Distribution, Cache-A's European distributor, at Broadcast Video Expo in February 2010 set the ball rolling to solve the problem. When Smith mentioned her archiving issues, they immediately suggested moving to digital tape. A short time after the show, Global established the best workflow to fit in with Friday's operations and also recommended ways to move content from the archive discs safely onto digital tape.

The recommended solution was the Cache-A Pro-Cache4 Archive Appliance, which stores 800GB of content on a single, secure and inexpensive data tape. The Cache-A Pro-Cache solution provided the security of writing to digital tape combined with writing to an open format. Longevity would also be guaranteed because LTO media has a 30-year life span. These features, combined with the ease of use and attractive price point of the Cache-A solution, helped Friday to decide on this system.

The system was purchased through Friday's local reseller, Cancom, and Friday's own team did the installation. "The system was straightforward to set up, and it's proved to be very easy to use," said Smith.

Friday edits its programs on four Final Cut Pro systems. Because there are typically several series or one-off shows being edited simultaneously, the media for each production are kept on the drives throughout the post process. Once a production has been completed and signed off, the Friday team transfers the entire project from the drives onto Cache-A tapes. A typical series might use 12 one terabyte drives (although the drives are not filled to capacity), and media from each drive is transferred to its own corresponding tape, which is carefully labeled and put away. The drives are then wiped ready to be reused.

The Friday team is able to access any part of a program on tape as required. "Cache-A uses tar, a standard non-proprietary tape format, so the content is just as accessible as it would be on a disc," said Smith. "We log on to the Cache-A Pro-Cache web browser from any networked workstation, do a simple search for the required content, locate and insert the LTO tape and then copy off what we need."

The physical space required to store the tapes is also reduced because the tapes are much smaller than discs. The archive system is already up and running, securing newly acquired content and also ensuring that existing archive is preserved for the future.

"The Cache-A solution has saved us money and space," she said, "but most importantly, it's given us and our clients the peace of mind that our archive content is stored securely on a long-term archive medium."