Greece TV Network Select IBM LTO

IBM Corporation announced that AlphaTV, a television network in
Greece, has overhauled its storage infrastructure with IBM tape solutions for
greater efficiencies, faster access to video and the ability to store more
video in less space.

The project unfolds as IBM celebrates the 60th anniversary of the
company’s magnetic tape innovation – a technology that helped the fledgling
electronic calculating industry move from paper punch cards to electronic
storage for the first time and usher in the modern age of computing.

AlphaTV has been broadcasting since 1996, creating and storing all
forms of video entertainment, from soap operas and documentaries, to movies and
sporting events, and creating a vast video archive along the way. Initially, it archived its programming on Sony Beta SP format video cassettes that
stored up to 90 minutes of content. Not long after, in need of storage that
offered greater density, it turned to DVCPRO format videos that stored up to
120 minutes. But even that format was not allowing the network to keep pace
with its ballooning archive, a storage infrastructure that by 2011 spanned over
1,507 square feet.

To get greater control of this infrastructure, AlphaTV turned to IBM
and its Linear Tape File System (LTFS) and IBM Linear Tape Open (LTO) Ultrium 5
tape drives, that can store up to 3TB, with 2:1 compression in a single
cartridge. With this solution, AlphaTV has been able to store more content in
far less space.

"A Greek TV series stored
on 100 DVCPRO tapes took up four shelves in our library, whereas on LTO-5
cartridge now takes up the space of a deck of playing cards," said
Constantinos Colombus, CTO at AlphaTV.

The move has helped the network shrink its archive from 1,507 to
just 388 square feet, representing systems and energy cost savings.

In addition to the sheer capacity gains of the LTO-5 drives, the
network’s use of IBM LTFS has enabled it to better manage the content on an
on-going basis. IBM LTFS, a graphical file system that provides
direct access to data on LTO-5 drives, has enabled AlphaTV to manage, move, and
share video files much like they can with disk management systems, by simply
dragging and dropping. As a result, file management is easier to do and far
more efficient, said Colombus.

AlphaTV’s move to IBM’s tape solution underscores the
ongoing value and the reverberating impact of the company’s research around
magnetic tape that began with a major breakthrough back in 1952. In that year,
IBM released the IBM 726
tape storage system, a hulking 935-pound system that stored up to 2.3MB of data
on reel-to-reel tape. Up to that point, magnetic tape was deemed unreliable and
problematic for data storage because the fast starts and stops of the
high-powered drives often snapped the relatively brittle media.

IBM researchers solved this problem by employing a ‘vacuum
column’ that gently pulled a portion of tape in between access times to
create a buffer, or a loop, of loose tape. With this buffer, the tape could
withstand the abrupt starts and stops. The innovation was widely adopted by the
industry and ushered in the era of modern computing.

More information on the 60th anniversary of IBM Tape Storage