The Museum of Broadcast Communications is using Cleversafe Dispersed Storage technology for storage and online delivery of some 5 Terabytes of digitized radio and television content.
“Due to its size, digital and unstructured data is challenging and expensive to store,” the supplier stated. “Cleversafe’s technology avoids the cost and inefficiency of traditional storage systems based on replication by dividing data into ‘slices’ and dispersing them, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a Dispersed Storage Network or dsNet. Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate the original data. Moreover, the sum capacity of all the slices is significantly less than maintaining multiple copies of the original data, making data management easier and less expensive.”
The supplier said a previous single-server storage setup didn’t suffice and that the museum had had to suspend its online services. MBC began working with Cleversafe in November, storing data across four dispersed locations.
“In addition to using Cleversafe to store their data, MBC also relies on the technology for distribution rather than implementing a separate content delivery network (CDN),” it continued. “When users view content on the MBC Web site, the data is pulled directly from Cleversafe and displayed via a media server in front of the Cleversafe hardware, saving MBC money and physical space without sacrificing performance or scalability for their end users.” The site has 20,000 registered users.
The organizations said the amount of data stored is expected to grow tenfold over the next few years.
