ScreenSound Australia
Digitises with StorageTek

CANBERRA

ScreenSound Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, has purchased StorageTek's automated tape library solutions to support its digitisation strategy.
ScreenSound Australia's extensive collection of audio recordings and still images is being ingested into a StorageTek L700 automated tape library with fibre-attached LTO Ultrium drives. The L700 has a capacity of 10 terabytes and will be progressively expanded, starting with the addition of higher capacity 2nd Generation tape drives.
"Data is now the preferred storage medium for all recorded sound," said Michael Tuite, ScreenSound Australia's E-Business Manager. "ScreenSound Australia is currently ingesting audio into digital data formats using seven purpose-built studios at the rate of two terabytes per year. The rate will increase to 100 terabytes per studio per year with stage two of ScreenSound Australia's digitisation project, which will encompass video.
"The conversion of archival material into digital data formats offers many benefits supporting ScreenSound Australia's stated mission, 'Preserving Australia's audiovisual culture for all to enjoy'. The benefits include lowering the cost of archiving, preserving audiovisual materials safely and indefinitely with no loss of quality, and enabling new forms of distribution."
"With digital you can have multiple copies and go on without loss of quality," added Tuite. "We can also deliver our content electronically. That is a big benefit to us. While preservation is key, one of the major reasons for preserving is to deliver that material for use by industry, the education sector and the general public."
In stage two of the digitisation project, ScreenSound Australia hopes to begin ingesting large volumes of video material using new purpose-built digital video studios. ScreenSound Australia is currently piloting video digitisation, ingesting digital video such as Betacam into digital data. These proprietary digital formats still require conversion to standard data formats.
"When you start digitising video and film it is a completely different story," said Mr Tuite. "A video facility would increase ongoing storage consumption by a factor of a hundred at least. StorageTek recognised that we were starting small but would continue to expand and they catered to a solution that could expand to meet the demand.
"While not currently cost-effective for ScreenSound Australia to digitise film for archiving," said Mr Tuite, "the falling cost of storage means that point will shortly be reached. As we go on, storage will get cheaper and we can store more. We anticipate in the next three to five years it will reach a point where film can be digitised at the right quality and it will be cost effective to store that data."
With the ingestion of video and film into ScreenSound Australia's digital archive, the total volume of data will eventually be counted in petabytes rather than terabytes.
"ScreenSound Australia is only a small organisation with 200 staff," said Mr Tuite. "Yet within five to ten years we will possibly be consuming more data storage than Centrelink with 24,000 staff and information about most of the people in Australia.
"ScreenSound Australia now sees StorageTek as its storage partner," said Mr Tuite. "StorageTek shares our vision for digital data storage and provides specialised skills, resources and expertise. StorageTek has been exemplary. They have been very willing to assist us over and above the terms of sale. They actively engaged with us regarding new technology and development and also problem solving."
"ScreenSound Australia's digitisation strategy displays great vision," said Philip Belcher, Managing Director for StorageTek Australia / New Zealand. "They can see the benefits information lifecycle management offers its huge collection of audio and video material and is creating storage solutions that are world's best practice in both cost-effectiveness and flexibility of content distribution."
In addition to the StorageTek L700 automated tape library, ScreenSound Australia's archiving and backup solution includes its own MAVIS (Merged AudioVisual Information System) software. Veritas NetBackup is also employed and Veritas Storage Migrator provides Nearline hierarchical storage management. Before the L700, ScreenSound purchased a three terabyte StorageTek disk and storage area network (SAN) solution. Originally for audio archiving, the StorageTek disk SAN is also now used for video buffering and 'browsing' copies of audio and video.

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