SGI LiveArc Digital Asset Management Suite by SGI and Arcitecta

Silicon Graphics International Corp. announced the availability of the LiveArc digital asset management software platform, a key component of the company’s InfiniteStorage Total Control Suite. With LiveArc, customers can create and manage all types of digital assets with complete flexibility and extreme scalability, ranging from single-user environments to widely distributed remote collaborations. LiveArc enables the concept of a true ‘living archive’ for all digital content in virtually any workflow.

Built on an extensible service-oriented architecture (SOA), LiveArc provides a multi-versioned asset management and revision control system with workflow and web serving in a single package. Not only does this simplify operation and administration, LiveArc’s flexibility also enables it to support the integration of legacy applications and metadata types, and to easily evolve as workflow requirements grow. This allows LiveArc to act as a common interface, bridging multiple legacy environments and overcoming incompatible data silos without the need to discard current applications or infrastructure.

“As data volumes continue to grow, so do the challenges for IT managers to cost-effectively provide higher levels of utilization across different data types and workflows,” said Giovanni Coglitore, senior vice president and chief products officer at SGI. “LiveArc is specifically designed to allow for faster discovery, one-step sharing and closer collaboration, enabling more efficient data management and reduced infrastructure costs.”

At its core, LiveArc is a comprehensive platform used to rapidly develop and deploy workflow-specific digital asset management solutions. Accessible via industry-standard protocols, LiveArc is platform neutral, and can be deployed on laptops, desktops and enterprise-class servers in all standard operating systems and file systems. Due to its unique and efficient binary XML object database, LiveArc also enables orders of magnitude better performance, yet requires a much smaller memory and database footprint than competing solutions. Other benefits include near zero administration while retaining open standard data portability.

LiveArc is tightly integrated with SGI’s DMF tier virtualization solution, which provides seamless online visibility to multiple types of disk and tape-based storage in a virtualized data pool. Adding LiveArc’s ability to federate across multiple, different data repositories in parallel, the platform offers virtually limitless ability to scale in both data volume and file count.

“LiveArc’s flexibility to aggregate across multiple data and metadata types makes it a compelling tool for bridging multiple data silos, particularly in very large archives,” said Benjamin S. Woo, vice president, enterprise storage systems of IDC. “This ability to federate between otherwise incompatible environments using open-standards increases the ability for users to quickly find and access what they need without requiring modification to the existing IT infrastructure.”

Product Availability:
LiveArc is a result of a development partnership between SGI and Arcitecta Pty. Ltd. of Australia, and is sold with SGI InfiniteStorage solutions. SGI has deployed LiveArc in media, science and research institutions, government and academia in the Asia Pacific region under the name Mediaflux. LiveArc is now exclusively available worldwide from SGI through SGI Professional Services.