Crawler Media Verification Engine by SAN Solutions

SAN Solutions, an architect of enterprise-class network storage infrastructures for the media and entertainment markets, announced that it will showcase the company’s new Crawler media verification engine, a stand-alone appliance that verifies the integrity of assets across an archive, at the 2009 NAB Show. In scanning file systems and indexing and verifying media across a SAN- or NAS-based architecture, the Crawler confirms the ongoing utility and value of stored media, and also enables the content owner to federate storage archives and use a central database to search all of its media assets.

"The value of a media asset lies in the owner’s ability to access and use that content when it is needed," said Harry Aine, president of SAN Solutions. "The Crawler gives content producers and owners security in the knowledge that all of the media required for production or delivery has been verified off the archive. Extensive indexing capabilities enable users to perform powerful searches and get the most out of their archives, and the Crawler’s high interoperability with other systems makes file verification part of a seamless asset management workflow."

The Crawler verifies both media essence and metadata on file systems (NFS, CIFS, StorNext, SM, Xsan, etc.) with the forward-looking flexibility to parse new file types as the media industry evolves. The highly scalable Crawler system can address archives of any volume and handle media assets of any size; the more Crawler servers applied to an archive, the greater their overall scanning speed. With the ability to configure the scanning and indexing process, the content owner can target and maximize the performance of the Crawler according to the company’s business needs. New and modified files are automatically recognized by the Crawler and processed according to predefined rules and settings. Optional deep metadata discovery allows for exacting evaluation and verification of media assets.

Data collected by SAN Solutions’ Crawler is written to a centralized metadata repository. The system also can import metadata from external asset management systems or export rich metadata to an HCAP repository to support the merging of content management systems or to populate the user’s preferred media asset management system (MAM). The Crawler’s open APIs facilitate integration with MAMs, in turn making specific media verification tasks available through the MAM user interface.