B&L Associates

An Olympic data storage feat

July 11, 2012

The summer Olympics is among one of the biggest sporting events around, with millions of people watching globally and national pride on the line with every competition. The victors will want to be able to look back and revel in their glory, while losers will need to review their performance to see what they have to do to improve. The rest of us just like to watch old sports reels.

How can new technology accommodate all that data, though? Putting the Olympics stream live in the cloud is simple enough, but that's because there's no storage utilitity involved - it's only available to watch, not download. Where does all of that information get stored? With something as momentous as the Olympics, it's important that the solution be able to fit every second, but it also has to be stable and secure.

That's why Forbes reported the British Broadcasting Company, the television entity with exclusive rights to record and distribute the London summer games, has teamed up with a backup storage tape provider to create a massive info-structure capable of housing all the recordings created in the 10TB-per-second stream. The source stated that this was the preferred storage method because the company felt more confident in the long-term safekeeping capabilities of backup tape over other alternatives.

"Data is growing at unprecedented rates," said Amit Malhotra of JAPAC Systems in an interview with IT Variety News. He told the source that since tape was cheap and easy to obtain and maintain, it was a prefered backup storage solution for companies trying to securely store large amounts of information for an extended period of time.