Lab Report: Achieving 1.2 petabytes of storage for the media industry

Introduction
Streaming services have revolutionized the way that people access entertainment and factual information. Ensuring that consumers can access content online wherever and whenever they like requires a significant amount of reliable data storage. When considering the storage and access of decentralized content from all over the world to enable flawless workflows in a multi-cloud environment, the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) might not be the first technology that springs to mind. Nevertheless, their usage in the media & entertainment industry is inevitable as HDDs deliver exabytes of reliable storage at reasonable cost.

Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (Toshiba) has showcased their data storage portfolio at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC) in Amsterdam for eight consecutive years. The focus for 2023 were the latest 20TB HDD models as based storage components for digital media and entertainment data storage. Together with our partners Promise, AIC, ATTO, Nanya and Open-E, Toshiba ran a live demonstration of a compact reference storage system optimized for the capacity and performance requirements of the media industry. In this lab report, Senior Manager Rainer W. Kaese describes the reference system in detail, summarizes the live demo results presented at the exhibition, and closes with more detailed performance and configuration benchmarks.

The partners
The HDD storage system was integrated with hardware and software from Toshiba’s trusted partners:
• Promise Technology for the 60-Bay top loader JBOD
• ATTO for the Host Bus Adapter Cards to connect JBOD andinternal drives
• AIC for the head node server
• Nanya Technology for the DRAM modules of the headnote server
• Open-E for the linux based ZFS software defined storageOpen-E JovianDSS
• ATTO for the 100GbE Network Interface Cards to connect to the application server

Download the whole Lab Report here.