The EBU has published a new guide ( EBU Tech 3359 ) to help media organisations answer a question that is easy to pose, but hard to answer: "How to find good enough media storage solutions at reasonable cost?". The question is hard because it requires balancing business needs with costs, both of which are not obvious to specify. Many organisations find it hard to identify their true storage demands, due to a lack of knowledge or resources. As the EBU guide notes, this can easily lead to solutions based on "a mix of old best practices and a wishful trust in vague promises about the coming high tech storage products". On the other side of the equation there are many hidden costs related to media storage. Tech 3359 identifies 26 (!) different types of costs, including those related to for example floor space, cooling, decommissioning, disaster recovery labour, and planned downtime.
Ivar Poijes (SR) and Chris Chambers (BBC & chair of the EBU FSS Group)
Besides providing a costs checklist, the EBU guide provides users with a systematic way to identify business needs. It divides media storage needs into 8 categories, each with a series of properties, such as performance, volume size, etc. Users can simply assign a quality level to each of these and arrive at a comprehensive view of their storage demands. The terminology used builds on the Media Storage Framework Model ( EBU Tech 3358) and should especially help users communicate their needs with their suppliers and/or IT department.
The EBU Media Storage Demands publication is largely based on ideas from Swedish Radio (SR). It was presented during the EBU Technology Network Seminar this week by Ivar Poijes (SR), one of the participants in the EBU Future Storage Systems (FSS) group.