REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Oct. 10, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Amplidata, innovator in unbreakable object-based storage technology, and Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), partner for the digitalization of the Montreux Jazz Festival archives, announced today that they are building a disk-based archive for the entire digital video collection of concerts recorded since the Montreux Jazz Festival’s inception 45 years ago.
Data archiving has become a focal point of debate in the storage industry, and customers are beginning to demand more accessible and affordable systems. EPFL has embarked on a project with Montreux Sounds, curator of the archives, to digitize more than 5,000 hours of concerts. Future recordings of the festival will also be stored on the infrastructure. This activity is part of the “Montreux Jazz digital project”, a cultural and educational initiative to safeguard this heritage and to emphasize its value in scientific and artistic projects. It is continuously financed by companies or private entities wishing to associate themselves to this unique initiative.
“We see an increase in organizations needing enhanced support for large scale data archiving, and current market offerings simply don’t make the cut for a variety of reasons,” said Wim De Wispelaere, CEO of Amplidata. “Using Amplidata’s solutions, an organization like Montreux Sounds, can now store and serve decades’ worth of video footage as well as providing a resource unlike any other to artists, scientists and students.”
In order to maintain a comprehensive history of the Festival’s music, Amplidata’s storage platform, AmpliStor, meets and exceeds an extensive list of critical features including: a long life cycle; low energy consumption; immediate access to the data; high security; easy replication mechanisms; and built-in redundancy to prevent loss of data. Additionally, EPFL can also prevent catastrophic data loss as the platform offers a much more reliable alternative to RAID-based systems—ensuring that the priceless videos will be protected from even the most unforeseeable of events.
“This partnership provided a fantastic opportunity to develop an innovative large-scale digital archiving solution that will store over 5000 hours of invaluable video footage. The result is a ground-breaking platform that will support the demands of the Montreux Jazz Festival’s fans for years to come,” said Alexandre Delidais, director of operations and development for EPFL’s role in the project. “Soon, the Active Archive platform will be duplicated at Montreux Sounds making many of the concerts available at the Montreux Jazz Cafe outlets – something that historically could not be accomplished with existing archiving systems.”
With access to these archives currently on the EPFL campus and at the Montreux Jazz Cafe outlets, anyone can study, discover or just enjoy an unprecedented amount of historic audio and video content. The Montreux Jazz Cafe is a chain of international restaurants and lounges where the customers can experience the Montreux Jazz world through its archival footage while enjoying a meal or a drink.
Amplidata’s AmpliStor has proven to be an ideal solution for digital video archives, it provides the performance needed to stream an immense amount of content over the Internet while maintaining an incredibly low total cost of ownership that comes in about four times less expensive than competitive solutions,” said Dominique Pitteloud, partner at Endeavour Vision, investor in Amplidata. “This collaboration between EPFL and Amplidata provides yet another strong validation for the AmpliStor solution.”
The Amplidata solution will be available for a full demonstration at SNW 2011 in Orlando, October 10-13. Please see us at the Hands-On-Lab.
