T3Media Digitally Archives More Than 100,000 Media Assets per Year Using Cost-Effective, Highly Available, and Reliable Storage Environment
 
 

T3Media Digitally Archives More Than 100,000 Media Assets per Year Using Cost-Effective, Highly Available, and Reliable Storage Environment

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T3Media (formerly Thought Equity Motion) offers cloud-based storage, access, and licensing for enterprise-scale video libraries. Its technology platform and services enable media owners to generate new value from their content while managing cost and complexity. Through www.t3licensing.com and its global sales force, the company licenses sports, news, and creative footage to producers in advertising, entertainment, publishing, and emerging media. Headquartered in Denver, T3Media has a digital refinery in Laramie, Wyoming and offices in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Sydney, Toronto, and London. Its sales-partner offices are in Paris and Mumbai.

As the company uploads tens-of-thousands-of hours of programming content and more than 100,000 media assets per year, it needed to deploy a cloud-based, digital storage environment that was cost-effective and readily accessible. In addition, it needed to ensure its storage environment could scale to meet clients’ future needs. Because many T3Media clients are in the media and entertainment industry—with digital assets that have more than a 30-year life span—the company also needed to ensure short- and long-term integrity for the content it is trusted to store.

After reviewing many vendors, T3Media deployed a storage environment built on Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, StorageTek T10000 tape drives, Sun Oracle disk storage, and Sun Storage Archive Manager. The primary storage site alone contains more than five petabytes of T3Media’s customer content. With the new storage environment, T3Media acquired the ability to add storage incrementally, on a per-customer basis, and efficiently save content on tape for pennies on the dollar, compared to disk storage.

T3Media also benefited from exceptional performance. With Oracle’s storage solutions, the company realized a three- to-five-times performance improvement, compared to its legacy disk storage environment. In addition, it used Oracle disk storage under an Apple-managed file system—which is for digitalization and manipulation—to consolidate the storage footprint and  eliminate redundancy, saving at least 25% in fiber duplication, card infrastructure, and management infrastructure costs.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from T3Media, Inc.

  • “Considering the extensive list of films, advertisements, and clips we store for our clients, we require a storage solution that efficiently, cost-effectively, and securely digitizes those assets while ensuring the ability to quickly scale as we continue to grow. Oracle’s StorageTek tape and disk storage solutions fit our needs perfectly, providing an integrated architecture that ensures we can store many terabytes daily and manage hundreds of thousands of assets effectively and efficiently.” – Brian Noecker, Vice President, Information Technology, T3Media

  • Deploy a cost-effective, readily-accessible, and highly-available environment for the company’s cloud-based storage clients, who largely come from the media and entertainment industry
  • Create a primary and secondary storage environment and enable the company to quickly digitize―often in the field―and store content for media clients and provide them with ready and reliable access to their content
  • Build a storage environment that can scale easily and cost-effectively to meet individual client needs, provide a competitive advantage, and support exabyte-scale archives
  • Ensure short- and long-term integrity for content the company is trusted to store, which includes clips and long-form assets from major sports, news, and entertainment libraries

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Built the company’s three-tier storage environment―metadata, disk, and tape tiers―on Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system, StorageTek T10000 tape drives, Oracle disk storage, and Sun Storage Archive Manager
  • Created a highly available, accessible, and scalable storage environment that contains more than five petabtyes of customer data in the tape environment, alone—ranging from sports, news, and entertainment content―with plans to scale to more than an exabyte of data
  • Gained the ability to incrementally add storage on a per-customer basis, which adds value for the company in the competitive cloud-storage sector
  • Used Oracle disk storage and Sun Storage Archive Manager to improve disk tier performance by a factor of three to five times, when compared to the legacy environment
  • Gained the ability to efficiently save content on tape for pennies on the dollar, compared to disk storage, with Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system and StorageTek T10000B tape drives, with plans to upgrade to StorageTek T10000C tape drives to take advantage of higher capacity and throughput―providing the company with a competitive advantage
  • Maintained the validity and integrity of customers’ archived digital assets, including films and other media that have more than a 30-year life span
  • Acquired the ability to effectively validate fields as content is transferred from one storage tier to another in the environment
  • Archived tens-of-thousands of hours of programming content and more than 100,000 media assets per year with reliable performance that meets the challenges of scaling over time
  • Used Oracle disk storage for an Apple managed file system—used for digitalization and manipulation—to consolidate the storage footprint and eliminate the need for a duplicate storage area network environment, which saved at least 25% in fiber duplication, and in card and management infrastructure costs
  • Gained granular, incremental control in terms of maintaining and pricing out storage units for clients

Why Oracle

T3Media chose Oracle’s storage solutions, based on reliability and scalability factors.

“We found that competing hierarchical storage management solutions had almost a 5% corruption rate, which was unacceptable for our business. With that in mind, we focused first on Oracle disk storage,” said Brian Noecker, vice president, information technology, T3Media. “Being able to access any tier from standard calls to the file system was also an important plus for us because it opened many opportunities for integration and our workflow.”

“As we built out our environment further with Oracle’s StorageTek SL8500 modular library system and StorageTek T10000 tape drives, we gained the ability to add storage incrementally and archive content very cost effectively,” Noecker said. “We look forward to upgrading to StorageTek T10000C, which will enable us to extend capacity and throughput and further maximize return on our tape investments.”

“We wanted a storage environment that would truly grow with us. We are in it for the long term and Oracle is offering exciting possibilities in terms of full-stack integration as well as powerful analytics going forward,” said Mark Lemmons, chief technology officer, T3Media. “In addition, Oracle’s commitment to integrating its StorageTek T10KC enterprise tape drives with its linear tape file system is a key factor for us, as it allows for true cross-enterprise compatibility.”