Digistor Provides Spectra Logic Solution for Digital Asset Management and Disaster Recovery to Preferred Media
The Challenge
Prior to purchasing Spectra Logic solutions, Preferred Media used a whitebox NAS system with Xendata software and a Quantum i500 tape library, for digital asset management. They decided to replace the aging, home-grown NAS solution, which was proving to be slow and difficult to manage. The whitebox NAS was initially deployed as the landing zone for ingest, a working area and low-resolution proxy storage for eMAM.
Preferred Media archives all of its information, including corporate data and digital assets, and wanted to preserve it forever on a tape library, given tape’s reputation as an affordable and secure platform for archived data. They needed a modern storage solution at their primary data center that offered high capacity, fast speeds and easy expandability to accommodate future growth. The new solution provides storage for content managed by eMAM asset management software, digitized legacy assets, data from several internal departments, and backup images. Preferred Media required reliable storage for digitized content, Veeam and ShadowProtect.
The Solution
Preferred Media chose a complete storage solution from Spectra Logic, including a Spectra® BlackPearl® Converged Storage System, Spectra® Verde® NAS Solution and Spectra® T200 Tape Library. The combined Spectra Logic solution provides the company with the speed and ease of use they desired.
"We chose Spectra Logic’s solution for our media and entertainment workflow because it is easy to use, expandable and meets our performance requirements. Spectra’s exceptional products, including Spectra’s BlackPearl, enable us to meet our archive and DR initiatives, are offered at a compelling price point, and include features that are not found with competing IP-based archive systems."
Rob Dunn, Technical Services Manager, Preferred Media
Spectra’s BlackPearl and T200 tape library are the heart of Preferred Media’s storage solution. Fully integrated and certified with eMAM, BlackPearl enables long-term storage of all assets managed by eMAM, while Verde NAS gives eMAM lowresolution storage and online scratch space providing a more streamlined, efficient workflow. BlackPearl enables Preferred Media to make multiple copies of data, allowing them to keep one copy in-house and a second copy either offsite or returned to their own customers in open LTFS format, for disaster recovery purposes.
Verde NAS was an ideal replacement for the organization’s aging NAS system. It not only increased the overall throughput of the eMAM workflow, but also reduced the administration overhead required. Preferred Media leverages Verde’s built-in NFI (Network File Interface) functionality, which comes free-of-charge with every unit. This feature automatically copies the incremental contents of a NAS volume to the BlackPearl on a scheduled basis, seamlessly protecting digitized assets along with Veeam and ShadowProtect backups, ensuring business continuity in the event that Preferred Media’s data were to be lost or compromised.
Environment Snapshot
- Spectra BlackPearl object store
- Spectra T200 Tape Library
- Three LTO-7 tape drives
- Spectra Verde NAS disk solution, 4U with 30 x 4TB disk drives
- eMAM Digital Asset Management software
- Veeam backup
- Shadow Protect backup
Why Spectra?
- Integration with existing products
- Ease of use
- Disk and tape offerings
- Reliability
- Affordability
- Convenience
Solution Recap
Spectra BlackPearl Converged Storage System – BlackPearl provides a modern, simple portal to a multi-tier storage architecture, breaking away from traditional and legacy solutions based on licensing models that drive greater costs when scaling. Designed for organizations where content and long-term integrity is at the core of their business, BlackPearl allows data to move seamlessly to disk and tape storage, in a way not previously possible. BlackPearl enables users to deploy tiers of storage, even cloud, that are cost effective, easy to manage and scalable to exabytes of data. BlackPearl’s simple RESTful API and integrated advanced bucket management (ABM) retains and manages an organization’s assets forever at costs as low as pennies per gigabyte.
Spectra Verde NAS Solution – Verde NAS is the optimal disk platform for the storage of mid-tier data, including primary storage offload, data staging, backup and archiving. Flexible, simple and affordable, the Spectra Verde delivers storage for as low as 7.5 cents per gigabyte. The expandable Verde disk solution provides raw storage capacities from 48TB to 10.7PB. Designed for a variety of workloads, a single Verde NAS solution supports three different disk drive types, including 4TB, 8TB and 12TB enterprise drives; 8TB archive drives; and high-performance SSD drives. Reliable, economical and archive-ready, Spectra Verde simplifies the data storage process.
Spectra T200 Tape Library – Designed to meet the performance backup and archive requirements of the most demanding small and medium-sized organizations, the Spectra T200 library is easy to use, manage and maintain. The T200 also integrates with Spectra’s BlackPearl, enabling users to easily store massive amounts of data forever at significantly less costs. Scalable from 50 to 200 slots, users can store over 2.4PB (6PB compressed) of data in this library. Equipped with the ability to use up to 8 LTO drives, users can transfer data up to 10.36 TB/hr. compressed) in a 20U form factor.
This Spectra solution was sold and supported by Digistor. To learn more about how Digistor can provide the best Storage, Digital Asset Management or disaster recovery solutions please contact Digistor.