Start-Up Cache-A Launches Its First Product

Cache-A Corporation, a supplier of network-attached archive appliances for the digital film and professional video industry, is making its debut at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB 2009), Las Vegas Convention Center, April 20-23. The company is demonstrating Prime-Cache, the first product in its new generation of storage solutions for professional video file-based workflows based on the award-winning A-Series technology, which has been integrated into many digital file-based workflows over the past four years.

The founders of Cache-A – Phil Ritti, Mark Ostlund and Tom Goldberg – were key members of the A-Series team at Quantum Corporation and all have extensive experience providing innovative solutions to professional video customers. Cache-A has licensed Quantum’s A-Series technology, which integrates with Linear Tape Open (LTO) data tape drives – the most successful line of tape drives ever produced, with more than 2.5 million drives deployed and 100 million cartridges shipped.

"Our new line of archive appliances — starting with Prime-Cache — extends the rich heritage of A-Series technology into future-generation LTO tape drives," said Phil Ritti, President and CEO of Cache-A Corporation. "As a company, we are very focused on offering today’s digital film and video professionals innovative products that make the archiving of video content truly economical, reliable and future-proof."

Prime-Cache writes data on secure, portable, interchangeable, industry-standard LTO-4 cartridges using a standard TAR format at a cost of approximately only 6 cents per gigabyte (GB) — and with an archive life of 30 years. Operating System independent, Prime-Cache can be deployed in Windows, MacOS and Unix environments to provide direct access to archived content from any platform with simultaneous multi-user access and volume sharing.

"Film and video professionals like us never cease our quest for new and better tools to improve our productivity, and we are very excited about Cache-A and its stunning new product line," said Mark L. Pederson, owner of Offhollywood Studios, a leading digital cinema company based in New York. "Having an archive appliance that can provide source masters for digital acquisition and project archives for postproduction, while becoming part of the workflow at any point in the process, removes many of the barriers we face to accessibility, productivity and reliability while offering long-term preservation of assets."

An early adopter and innovator, Offhollywood has been regularly tapped both by major studios and independent producers to tackle the most challenging projects. A leader in 4K digital cinema services, Offhollywood has been providing RED One 4K cameras, technical support, workflow and postproduction services since the first RED cameras were released.

As an existing LTO-3 A-Series customer, Offhollywood has hundreds of LTO-3 cartridges stored at its facility, according to John "Pliny" Eremic, director of post/ops at Offhollywood. He found the technology easy to deploy and highly reliable, with a file system on each cartridge making the cartridges easily exchangeable and transportable.

"Based on our experience, we are really looking forward to Cache-A’s new products, starting with Prime-Cache," said Pliny. "It is a very well thought-out product that truly looks at how digital professionals work and addresses their needs now and for the future. It builds on the existing technology while offering many new and very useful features, such as that content written on the LTO-4 can be read by any drive and will be forward compatible for two generations."

Pliny noted that they are also particularly excited that the capacity of each cartridge has doubled from 400GB to 800GB and that the fast 50MB/s transfer rate now makes it practical to constantly move material to nearline storage. He added that the built-in searchable database, which enables the appliance to remember all of the tapes it has seen, will save them a tremendous amount of time manually looking for a particular tape or scene.

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Start-Up Cache-A Will Develop Future Generations of Professional Video Solutions With LTO-4