ßroadcastEnsineerin - AmericanRadioHistory.Com

TECHNOLOGY IN TRANSITION
LTFS and asset
management
An IT standard future -proofs broadcast assets.
NEW PRODUCTS & REVIEWS
It is all too easy to think of asset
management as an activity in
the present tense: It is a system
to help us find content now. But
its historical role is every bit as important.
For a broadcaster, the asset
management system should support
the ingest of library content as well as
new material, and most important, it
should protect it for the future.
Today's content will probably have
commercial value; it will be a source
of continuing revenue. And it will
certainly have cultural and social value,
as a history of what we watch. So
it is vital that the content is not just
preserved, but is accessible far into
the future.
The challenge here is that technology
is constantly changing. The way
that we store content is necessarily
migrating, which is generally a good
thing, as each new generation brings
improved quality and performance.
But the flip side of technological
innovation is that the old formats
become obsolete. If you have an archive
on tin quad VTR tape, then
today you have a serious problem
accessing it.
In broadcast, we have a secondary
problem. For most of its history, the
particular challenges of television
meant that we were forced to rely
on application- specific technologies,
and these inevitably were driven by
proprietary standards. Today, much
of what we need to do can now be
accomplished by standard IT equipment
and protocols - but the temptation
remains to continue the mantra
that television is different; therefore,
it needs specific solutions.
So we continue to see proprietary
solutions proposed for the broadcast
industry. That raises a number of
BY TONY TAYLOR
issues, including portability - it is
hard to take one proprietary solution
to another vendor's hardware - and
cost - it is expensive for the broadcast
industry to keep reinventing
the wheel.
As an asset management specialist,
focusing on the challenges of
preserving archives and making
them widely available, I would
argue that now is the time to
take that giant step away from
proprietary solutions toward an IT
standard that is designed specifically
to meet the challenges of longevity
and portability.
LinearTape File System
The Linear Tape File System (LTFS)
is a file system for data archives, developed
by IBM but published as an
open standard and now widely adopted
by leading vendors. Interestingly,
although it was designed as an
IT- industry open standard, the proponents
of LTFS chose to launch it at
NAB in April 2010.
What makes LTFS different from
existing schemes, and where does it
Portable
Open
Self- describing
Resilient
Longevity
sit alongside the familiar LTO series
of tape formats? The key is in the FS
part of its name: It is a file system.
Specifically, it is a self -describing file
system. It defines the organization of
both data and metadata on each tape.
That means that tapes written in
the LTFS format can be used independently
of any external database
or storage system. So an
LTFS- format tape can be taken
from one system - such as an
asset management system - and
read by any other without problems.
Arguably, for the first time, digital assets
are truly portable.
It also makes for extraordinary resilience,
as shown in Figure 1. Should
the worst happen, and fire or flood
destroy your entire archive system,
a completely new asset management
database could be built from
LTFS tapes.
Some argue that LTFS is not the
solution because it is a compromise
design, created with the emphasis
on simple portability rather than incorporating
all the bells and whistles
that they believe we need. That is the
LTFS
Manufacturer
format
Figure 1. LTFS offers the resilience and longevity that other broadcast -industry
solutions have lacked.
March 2013 I broadcastengineering.com
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