Post Magazine interviewed BAM’s Brian Reed about storage needs for audio facilities for their September issue.
Audio Storage Needs – Managing and Archiving Data. (BAM edited portion)
Brian Reed, president of BAM Studios in Chicago, is also a sound designer and mixer at the facility. BAM Studios (www.bamstudios.com) offers a large variety of audio services, from mixing TV spots and original music, to capturing location sound. BAM has three Pro Tools audio suites, plus one Final Cut Pro workstation to handle file prep. Everything is networked via Gigabit Ethernet to three separate RAID systems. Two RAIDs are used for back-up and archiving, and the third houses the facility’s sound effects and music library. Pro Tools sessions are created locally on the Mac and saved to a dedicated 1TB internal SATA drive. When a session is complete, it is then copied to the two separate RAID systems.
BAM Studios is phasing out their old 19TB Kano Technologies RAID in favor a new RAID system by Drobo. The Drobo RAID writes data to three drives at once, so even if two drives failed, the data wouldn’t be lost. When you install a new drive, the Drobo RAID rebuilds the data. Drobo created a proprietary RAID technology, called BeyondRAID, which allows the user to add a new drive, or swap out a drive, at any time. With old RAID technology, if you want to increase the capacity, the whole system would have to be formatted at the same time. With Drobo, you can simply swap out a smaller drive in the system for a larger one.
“The Drobo grows with you. As the drives get larger, we can just put in new drives and populate those with the original data, plus have room for new data,” explains Reed. “So when we have to go back to projects, they’re always right there.”
He uses the Drobo for back-ups and long-term archives.They’ve phased out DDS 4 tapes in favor of a RAID system that gives them instant access to archived sessions. “We did the DDS tapes, and I’ve had my problems with those, but now since drives are getting cheaper and RAID technology has gotten easier to manage, we’re now archiving our material to the Drobo»
For full article visit: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/82522/39
