At NAB Front Porch Digital debuted its AXF open digital storage format. “We decided to specify AXF and offer it to the industry – we have the support of SMPTE and want other manufacturers to join us,” FPD’s Rino Petricolo told Fergal Ringrose.
Front Porch Digital was a founding member of the SMPTE AXF committee in 2006. “Unfortunately, standards body work occasionally cannot keep pace with technical innovation,” said FPD CTO Brian Campanotti. “When the SMPTE AXF committee went into a hiatus in 2008, we went back to the drawing board and leveraged more than a decade of expertise in storage technology and large-scale archiving systems to design, develop, and implement AXF.
“For me, this has been a personal and professional priority, and it required a significant amount of R&D resources. The result is an important achievement that we are proud to contribute back to the community. This truly is a game-changer.”
Front Porch Digital based AXF on a file and storage media agnostic encapsulation approach that abstracts the underlying file systems, operating systems and storage technologies, making the format truly open. The AXF object contains any type, any number, and any size of files along with structured and unstructured metadata, checksum and provenance information, full indexing structures and more, all in a single, fully self-describing, encapsulated package.
Since the AXF object itself contains the complete file system, all of the complexities and limitations of the underlying storage technology, operating system and file system are avoided, and the same AXF object can exist on data tape, spinning disk, flash, optical media or other storage technology now and into the future.
AXF was previewed as a key feature of DIVArchive V7.0 — part of the Front Porch Digital DIVASolutions line of products — at the 2011 NAB Show. The latest incarnation of DIVArchive is set for release to the marketplace later this year.
