Amplidata Building Disk-Based Video Archive of Montreux Jazz Festival

Amplidata is building a disk-based
archive for the entire digital video collection of concerts recorded since the
Montreux Jazz Festival´s inception 45 years ago.

Data archiving has become a focal point of debate in the storage industry, and
customers are beginning to demand more accessible and affordable systems. Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne
has embarked on a project with Montreux Sounds, curator of the archives, to
digitize more than 5,000 hours of concerts. Future recordings of the festival
will also be stored on the infrastructure. This activity is part of the ‘Montreux Jazz digital project’, a cultural and educational
initiative to safeguard this heritage and to emphasize its value in scientific
and artistic projects. It is continuously financed by companies or private
entities wishing to associate themselves to this initiative.

"We see an increase in organizations
needing enhanced support for large scale data archiving, and current market
offerings simply don’t make the cut for a variety of reasons," said
Wim De Wispelaere, CEO of Amplidata. "Using
Amplidata’s solutions, an organization like Montreux Sounds, can now store and
serve decades’ worth of video footage as well as providing a resource unlike
any other to artists, scientists and students."

In order to maintain a comprehensive history of the Festival’s music,
Amplidata´s storage platform, AmpliStor, meets a list of features including: a long life cycle; low energy consumption;
immediate access to the data; high security; easy replication mechanisms; and
built-in redundancy to prevent loss of data. Additionally, EPFL can also
prevent catastrophic data loss as the platform offers a more reliable
alternative to RAID-based systems-ensuring that the priceless videos will be
protected from even the most unforeseeable of events.

"This partnership provided a
fantastic opportunity to develop an innovative large-scale digital archiving
solution that will store over 5000 hours of invaluable video footage. The
result is a ground-breaking platform that will support the demands of the
Montreux Jazz Festival’s fans for years to come," said Alexandre
Delidais, director of operations and development for EPFL’s role in the
project. "Soon, the Active Archive
platform will be duplicated at Montreux Sounds making many of the concerts
available at the Montreux Jazz Cafe outlets – something that historically could
not be accomplished with existing archiving systems."

With access to these archives currently on the EPFL campus and at the Montreux
Jazz Cafe outlets, anyone can study, discover or enjoy an amount of historic audio and video content. The Montreux Jazz Cafe is a chain
of international restaurants and lounges where the customers can experience the
Montreux Jazz world through its archival footage.

”Amplidata’s AmpliStor has proven to be
an ideal solution for digital video archives, it provides the performance
needed to stream an immense amount of content over the Internet while
maintaining an incredibly low total cost of ownership that comes in about four
times less expensive than competitive solutions, " said Dominique
Pitteloud, partner at Endeavour Vision, investor in Amplidata. "This collaboration between EPFL and
Amplidata provides yet another strong validation for the AmpliStor solution."

The Amplidata solution was available for a demonstration at SNW 2011
in Orlando,
October 10-13.