The-Mill Uses Tandberg’s LTO-4 FC Drives

Tandberg Data has installed LTO-4 Fibre Channel tape drive solutions to provide fast access and retrieval speeds to The-Mill’s 20 editing suites. The visual effects company has realized significant cost savings, increased performance and reduced downtime in its production environment.

One of the world’s leading visual effects companies, The-Mill has offices in the main advertising centres of the world: London, New York and Los Angeles. The company focuses on providing dramatic, award-winning and innovative visual production effects. The London Soho office specialises in the provision of ambient media supply, such as content for in-store advertising at Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. This office also houses 20 editing suites that ad agencies use to create commercials for delivery by BEAM TV to the TV stations.
 
Cognitive Network Solutions Ltd., trusted storage advisor to The-Mill, decided that the best solution for their data growth was to install Tandberg Data LTO-4 tape drives in each editing studio, allowing each suite to operate independently to benefit from exceptionally fast archiving and restore operations.
 
Use of the Tandberg Data LTO-4 drives within each suite has produced significant time savings over capturing standard definition video – 2 or 3 times faster than previously, and the real time access has also improved significantly; cutting down costs for clients within the editing suites.

Each drive is essential to the running of the suite; failure of a drive negates the use of the suite. The Tandberg Data LTO-4 drives boast one of the best reliability and data integrity records in the industry with mean time between failures of 250,000 hours – and that’s if the suites are running at 100% capacity 24×7.
 
Speed and reliability to one side, Paul Crisp, Systems Software Manager at The-Mill, recognises there is also a significant cost savings to be utilized from installing the Tandberg Data tape drives. He notes: “One of the compelling benefits of the total system has to be that of cost. Each system carries a price tag of around £2000. Compare that with the initial disk-based quotes which came above £200,000 for similar functionality.”
 
Each system is backed up every night and archived daily by the operator with a final archive being stored offsite on tape. Each of the Tandberg Data LTO-4 tapes is capable of supporting 256 bit encryption and LTO WORM (write once, read many) for regulatory compliance. Training required for each operator was minimal and wizard driven as each drive features Symantec’s Backup Exec QuickStart software. The-Mill now is positioned for even more data growth as each LTO-4 tape drive has a native capacity of 800GB.
 
The installations in the UK have been so successful that the Los Angeles office of The-Mill now plans to adopt the same infrastructure. And with LTO technology as the defined industry standard in tape, the team knows that their investment is protected globally, whatever growth they face.