As I mentioned in my last post, [IBM announces the 60th anniversary of digital tape storage systems]. As promised, I am back in Tucson today to enjoy the festivities.

Ten years ago, I travelled to New York City with my colleague, Randy Fleenor, to present the latest in IBM tape technology for the 50th Anniversary. On Thursday evening that week, the latest movie in the Star Wars saga, Episode II: Attack of the Clones was just released, and it was being shown using the new Digital Light Projection (DLP) technology just around the corner at the Ziegfeld theater! This movie was the first live-action film to be filmed entirely digital. George Lucas saw that digital video was the future, and started the process moving forward with this film.

I convinced Randy to join me, and we arrived at 11:10pm, the movie was scheduled to start at 11pm, so we figured we had only missed a few previews. We walked into a completely empty lobby. I asked for two tickets for the 11pm show at the ticket counter, and was told it was all sold out, and there was a huge line around the building for all the people waiting to see the 1:00am show, and that we might get in to see the 3:00am show.

Randy and I had meetings on Friday morning, so we were not going to wait in line all night to see a 3am show! Just then, a young man comes out of the theater. He said his girlfriend can't make it, and wanted a refund for his two tickets. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, offered to buy them directly at face value, and the theater employees approved the transaction. The seats were front row of the balcony section. By then we had missed all the previews and a short bit of the movie, but that was alright with us.

(FTC Disclosure: I am both an employee and stockholder in IBM. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may consider this a paid, celebrity endorsement of LTO-5 tapes and the LTFS technology. References to other companies are for illustrative purposes and do not represent an endorsement of their products or services.)

Digital recording is ideal for all types of video, including movies, television, and commercial advertisements. The latest excitement is over IBM's Linear Tape File System™ (LTFS), which IBM donated to the IT industry as open source so that everyone in the world can benefit. This allows tape cartridges to be treated like USB memory sticks, the ultimate in portability of data. It is supported for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, and already well embraced by the Media-and-Entertainment (M&E) industry.

Last week, IBM announced that it has helped [Greece's AlphaTV with LTFS on LTO-5 tape technology]. Here is an excerpt:

"The move to IBM technology has helped the network shrink its archive from 1,507 to just 388 square feet, representing dramatic systems and energy-cost savings."

"AlphaTV has been broadcasting since 1996, creating and storing all forms of video entertainment, from soap operas and documentaries, to movies and sporting events, and creating a vast video archive along the way. Initially, AlphaTV archived its programming on Sony Beta SP format video cassettes that stored up to 90 minutes of content. Not long after, in need of storage that offered greater density, it turned to DVCPRO format videos that stored up to 120 minutes. But even that format was not allowing the network to keep pace with its ballooning archive, a storage infrastructure that by 2011 spanned more than 1,507 square feet."

"'A Greek TV series stored on 100 DVCPRO tapes took up four shelves in our library, whereas on LTO-5 cartridge now takes up the space of a deck of playing cards,' Constantinos Colombus, chief technology officer at AlphaTV, said in a statement."

"IBM LTFS, an intuitive and graphical file system that provides direct access to data on LTO 5 drives, has enabled AlphaTV to manage, move and share video files much like they can with disk-management systems, by simply dragging and dropping. As a result, file management is easier to do and far more efficient, said Colombus."

To prepare for this anniversary, I spoke with Brad Johns, of [Brad Johns Consulting]. Brad was head of IBM tape marketing for a while, and ran tape customer councils to gather feedback from our largest customers. Brad was my mentor in marketing at IBM from 2003-2007 and has since retired from IBM to start his own consulting practice.

His latest publication is a TCO study entitled [A New Approach to Lowering the Cost of Storing File Archive Information] where he evaluated the 10-year total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage systems to hold file archives.

The comparison was made between Crossroad Systems' Strongbox® with Enterprise tape library, LTO-5 tapes using LTFS, versus a unified disk storage system offering NAS protocols on high-capacity 3TB drives. The findings: the tape-based archive had nearly 80 percent lower TCO than the disk-based solution!

You don't have to be in the middle of the Greek economy to real that is a good value!

technorati tags: IBM, DLP, Randy Fleenor, Star Wars, George Lucas, AlphaTV, LTO-5, tape, LTFS, TCO, Sony, DVCPRO

Tags:  star+wars ltfs george+lucas lto-5 ibm dlp alphatv sony dvcpro randy+fleenor tape tco