LTFS Transforms LTO Tape into Nearline Storage: Accelerating 4K Media Workflows

Linear Tape-Open (LTO) has emerged as an economical, long-term storage medium for the increasing amounts of high resolution content in file-based workflows. LTO is a serial access storage medium where files cannot be directly accessed, and requiring files be restored prior to use. While this model has worked well for users of smaller file sizes, restoring large files from LTO to disk presents a new set of challenges. In addition to requiring complex and costly storage architectures, restoring immense amounts of high resolution content (2K, 4K, UHD) from LTO causes bottlenecks in file-based workflows and make it difficult and time consuming to repurpose content. — Linear Tape File System (LTFS) technology has the potential to turn LTO tape into a direct access storage medium, much like disk. While LTFS alone does a good job of presenting a file system, it does little to alleviate the inherent serial access latencies of LTO tape. In most cases, when an LTFS file system is exposed to an application, unacceptable response times caused by tape latencies result in a poor end user experience. — Direct access technology, DNA Evolution™ “Smart Access”, works together with LTFS to enable intelligent, selective caching of portions of files on LTO in a manner that allows third-party applications to have seamless access to LTFS-formatted LTO tapes. By combining “Smart Access” with LTFS, the LTO tape can become a nearline storage medium capable of supporting tasks such as: transcoding, shot selection, partial restore, remote transfers, and distribution, for faster and more cost-effective media pipelines.

Published

2014-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

LTO, LTFS, Direct Access, File-based Workflows, 4K, HD, asset management, HSM, Active Archiving

DOI

10.5594/M001577

ISBN

978-1-61482-954-6