STREAMING MEDIA ZOOMS IN -- Rising use of Internet video and audio triggers storage explosion
Joseph F. Kovar
Irvine, Calif. - Increasing amounts of video, audio and rich media being stored and transferred over intranets and the Internet is triggering the next storage explosion.
Internet content managers say their Web sites already contain an average of 30 Gbytes of data, 2 percent of which is streaming media, according to a recent study by The HTRC Group, a San Andreas, Calif.-based research firm.
Thirty-five percent of Web sites currently offer streaming media and 56 percent plan to do so next year, says Greg Howard, principle analyst at HTRC.
This will place enormous loads on storage infrastructures, says Howard. Such files are among the largest and may be coded and stored in up to six different formats-56 Kbps, 100 Kbps and 300 Kbps, as well as files compatible with Windows Media Player and Real Video-to accommodate end users' download requirements.
Storage vendors are already scrambling to ensure that their equipment is ready to take advantage of video.
In August, EMC acquired Avalon Consulting Group, a supplier of rich media management software for the television broadcast industry.
EMC's interest in rich media-and its interest in Avalon-stems from its belief that a significant percentage of the digital data pie will be rich media, says Doron Kempel, vice president and general manager of the company's Media Solutions Group.
It makes sense for vendors like EMC to be in this market, says Kempel. While broadcasting standards vary from country to country, standard-definition television programming in general requires speeds of 6 to 12 Mbps, compared with 1.5 Gbps for production-quality video, he says. Two hours of production-quality video requires 1.35 Tbytes of storage, Kempel estimates.
Network Appliance, which produces both network-attached storage (NAS) appliances and video-caching appliances, recently started working with Internet Pictures to develop solutions to enable media delivery applications for geographically dispersed enterprises.
Storage service providers (SSPs) are also getting in on the video action.
StorageNetworks recently joined the Content Alliance, a Cisco-led group of service providers, content owners and other vendors aimed at developing and promoting content networking services.
In September, EMC was a new investor in the latest round of funding for ManagedStorage International, an SSP that was spun off from tape library vendor Storage Technology. EMC hopes to facilitate technology collaboration between the two companies in storage and content management, an EMC spokesman says.
Josh Coates, founder and acting CEO of Scale Eight, an SSP targeting the video market, says SSPs will be indispensable to content providers looking to serve video to customers.
"If 10 percent of AOL users want to upload two 10-minute videos at VHS quality, it will require 800 Tbytes," says Coates. "There are massive scalability issues. And they are global in nature."
Solution providers are starting to reap the benefits of working in both markets.
Streaming media clients' storage requirements are going to be explosive, says Mike Linett, owner and president of Zerowait, a Newark, Del.-based solution provider.
Until now, streaming media solutions have been "kludgy," but certain markets will be early adopters, says Linett. Corporate training is one such market, as it allows companies to send information quickly. Others include the medical profession, where video training is common, and government agencies involved in security monitoring.
One segment of the video market adopting solid-state drives is the pornography industry, says Linett. "It's the only way to handle the high credit card hits," he says.
Solution providers are important to this market because of the need to fit video caching, near-line storage and tape equipment to existing IT infrastructures, Linett says. "We never get a clean slate to do this," he says. "Customers always have some legacy equipment."
While The Presidio Corp., a Lanham, Md.-based video and data networking integrator, doesn't deal directly with storage equipment, it works closely with customers to help ensure they understand their storage requirements, says Chris Collora, vice president of sales.
For instance, government agencies are replacing VHS with storage video served over networks, says Collora. "When you FedEx VHS tapes around the world, it starts getting expensive," he says.
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