SWR Selects Jordi’s Adam For Digital Archive

The German public service broadcaster Suedwestrundfunk (SWR) has addressed a major tape archive digitization effort by using the Adam solution from the Swiss-based archiving specialist Jordi AG which includes encoding and storage products of Rohde & Schwarz.

SWR needs to archive more than 40,000 tape hours of content each year. To alleviate its growing tape deterioration issues, the broadcaster decided to digitize its entire tape-based archives. SWR settled on a migration system that combines Jordi’s automated digital migration system Adam with Rohde & Schwarz’s Venice video servers and R&S SpycerBox modular storage system running IBM Spectrum Scale.

Adam is a fully automated, self-monitoring archive migration system that orchestrates all the workflow steps from tape insertion to content migration. R&S Venice video servers encode all of the content into the final archive format and then R&S SpycerBox Cell and Ultra TL storage units are employed to perform all data buffering and transfer operations to SWR’s archive administration system.

According to R&S, the turnkey system is more than 40 times faster than previous manual workflows and it can run for 72 hours in lights-out mode meaning that it can operate unattended throughout an entire weekend.

Six remote-controlled VTRs ingest content via a four-channel R&S Venice and another two-channel R&S Venice server that are FIMS-controlled from a Jordi AG controller.

Media is recorded on to a single common R&S SpycerBox Cell SAS storage unit (27TB) and subsequently copied to another R&S SpycerBox Ultra TL unit which serves as a mid-term, non-realtime working buffer for the ingested clips.

From there, the clips are made available to external LoRes creation engines and to external QC and reporting engines. The archive system backbone is created by a 40 GbE physical layer and IBM Spectrum Scale with NSD packets as a block-organized media exchange mechanism.

As part of the subsequent archiving process, LTO6 tapes are used as a long-term recording media. To maintain the required sustained data rate of 300 MB/s, ADAM uses a R&S SpycerBox Cell in combination with a R&S SpycerBox Ultra TL. These two storage systems are connected via 40 Gbit Ethernet, based on the IBM Spectrum Scale file system. The R&S SpycerBox Cell storage system serves as a buffer memory and records the encoded files from R&S Venice.

This data is then transferred to a R&S SpycerBox Ultra TL which serves as a mid-term working buffer. The R&S SpycerBox Ultra TL guarantees a sustained data rate of at least 300 MB/s during the subsequent processes.