NAB 2011: SGL Products Preview

2011 NAB Show Preview
SGL
Booth N2821

SGL (Software Generation LTD.) is a provider of content archive and storage management solutions to the broadcast industry. Products making their worldwide debuts at NAB 2011 include:

Support for LTFS—A new system for writing data to the LTO Program (HP, IBM & Quantum) Linear Tape File System (LTFS). This real-world working demonstration will illustrate how FlashNet is breaking new ground in archive technology. Traditionally, data written to a media archive is done so in a proprietary way, which means there is no interoperability between systems from different vendors. Additionally, standalone tape drives and archive libraries could only be controlled by archive management systems. However, this is no longer the case with the advent of LTFS. Specific to the LTO-5 tape format and all future LTO tape formats, LTFS enables true interoperability between what were once disparate systems. As well as the broadcast sector this approach has wide implications for post production and acquisition workflows where content can be acquired to disk on location, dragged and dropped to data tape and then the tape transported back to a facility.

Amalgamation Service—A key new feature of SGL FlashNet 6.4 is the Amalgamation Service, a workflow enhancement tool that allows small files to be archived more efficiently while significantly increasing access time. When small files are written to disk in a random access environment and then stored to tape, retrieval is time consuming because the whole tape has to be searched to find the relevant data. With SGL’s Amalgamation Service the small files on the disk are amalgamated and stored as one chunk of uncompressed media in an “archive container” and then written to tape. Each section of media has a pointer that allows it to be retrieved quickly and efficiently. This is particularly useful for broadcasters and film preservation environments that store thousands of small files in a disk/tape scenario.

Improved Tape Location Performance—A further new feature of FlashNet 6.4 is its ability to store index information on the Cartridge Memory chip on LTO tape formats providing significantly improved access speed. Traditionally index information is written on a partition on the tape and in order to access that information the tape has to be loaded and spooled. By writing to the Cartridge Memory chip, indexes are more quickly accessed by the drive, resulting in rapid tape positioning and data access.