Acatar-m Project to Provide Advancements in Archival of Audio Visual Material

Xyratex Ltd. announced the public launch of the AVATAR-m research project at this year’s NAB show in Las Vegas. There was a demonstration of prototype systems at the project booth, together with a short film outlining both the critical business need for the project’s innovations and the key technological developments. The AVATAR-m announcement corresponds with the launch of the research website providing more details, including video, white papers and other downloads associated with the project.

AVATAR-m is a collaborative R&D project, supported by the UK Technology Strategy Board. Xyratex is working alongside the BBC, the University of Edinburgh, University of Southampton IT Innovation Centre, and Ovation Data Services to develop innovative new solutions for very large scale digital storage archival of digital audio visual (A/V) content. The key technologies being demonstrated this week are planning and management software for large digital storage arrays. The systems are being designed with the capability to scale into exabyte ranges (1 exabyte = 1 thousand petabytes = 1 million terabytes = 1 BILLION gigabytes), and to easily accommodate a wide range of technologies, including distributed storage services across ‘Cloud’ environments.

The goal of the AVATAR-m project is to store very large volumes of digital A/V material safe for long periods of time by using mass storage technology in a way that allows you to keep that material secure and accessible for the people using it, as well as keeping the material safe. There has to be some certainty that if you put valuable assets into the archive, that you can get them back out again, not just tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year but in 5, 10 or even 50 years’ time.

The AVATAR-m project will make the infrastructure affordable, economic and feasible. AVATAR-m’s technologies, its processes, software and hardware are all completing their research phase this year.