Arkivum is a new business, spun out of the University of Southampton earlier this year. It specialises in secure data storage, and at IBC it launched its offering to broadcast and media companies.
At the broadcaster end the A-Stor system is a gateway appliance sitting on the network, which shows the archive as a single file system to all authorised users. Content is archived and retrieved by drag and drop.
The media is transferred over a secure network to Arkivum’s two geographically remote data centres in parallel. The two centres also communicate directly, ensuring that both are maintained with the latest data.
Critically, they are also backed up in another remote data centre, maintained by a third party escrow service as a security vault. It is this which allows Arkivum to guarantee 100% data integrity.
Within the A-Stor data centres the content is stored on LTO/LTFS tape archives, which are less than half the price of storing the data on in-house spinning disks while providing online access within five minutes. Being a remote service in a dedicated data centre, it significantly reduces the carbon footprint – typically by 90% – compared with the power consumption and heat generation of an in-house service.
