If you are exploring the possibility of outsourcing your digital storage outside of your own organisation, you are now entering a very dynamic marketplace. In both the public and private sectors there are a growing range of options to explore, and an increasingly competitive range of service providers available.
Outsourced commercial storage is already a large market for the IT industry in general. However, there are only a few offerings in that market currently which are focused squarely on audio visual archives. These are explored below.
A more recent development has been the emergence of public sector storage options. There are only a few of these at present, but the idea is growing in popularity, not least because it offers low costs and long term public body commitment to accessibility. If your archive is primarily accessed by the public and is concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage, then this option may be attractive.
Public Sector Outsourcing- Creative Commons
If the content in your archive is for access and use by the public, then by utilising a new form of copyright licensing it may be possible for you to store it within one of a new generation of public sector and charitable digital repositories. Such storage options are being developed at present, and may become significant for the archiving of digital media in Europe. At the very least, it is likely they will have an impact on the education, public service broadcasting, and cultural heritage archive markets.
At the core of these projects is a new licensing concept, Creative Commons. Based on the legal framework for open source software, this is a copyright control which allows very wide access, distribution and re-use of content, so long as no further restriction is placed upon any used content, or any work derived from that initial, creative commons licensed material. Clearly, there are many commercially produced works that would not be appropriate to store with only creative commons licensing restrictions on their re-use. However, where such commercial considerations do not apply, and the revenue from commercial licensing for re-use is not available, distribution in this manner may be attractive, particularly when the costs associated with long term storage and access management are borne not by the archive, but by a public or charitable body.
The list below is of archives already using the creative commons model, or variants upon it.
BBC Creative Archive,
The Internet Archive
Further development in this field is imminent.
Private Sector Outsourcing- Contracting the Future
The commercial digital storage market seems a very crowded one, with hundreds of companies vying for your attention. However, there are very many layers to the storage market, and if you are looking for companies who can host your entire outsourced audio video archive, the field is somewhat less broad. There are typically two sorts of offering available- off site hosting, or Storage Services Providers, and on site storage management.
In the former, the entirety of the data storage and networking issues are handled within the vendors own facility, and the content may be spread across geographically separate locations, if required and if compatible with the access requirements specified. It is not uncommon for such storage offerings to include access services, to both your own staff engaged in cataloguing activities and storage ingest, and also to your customer, borrowers or clients. Vendors in this area may be dedicated storage providers, internet service providers or telecommunications companies, and the rage of services associated with the storage may be virtually limitless.
Examples of companies offering this service include:
British Telecom Mediahive,
FalconStor,
eVault,
NaviSite
On site storage management is an option that also has many adherents. In this arrangement, the specification, installation and management of the facility is outsourced to a specialised company, but the storage equipment remains within the archives own facility. For archives handling particularly valuable or sensitive data, this has proved a popular choice, and it is certainly the preferred option for many large scale data storage customers in the financial field amongst others. It also has the advantage that access to your data is not dependant upon network connections outside of your control.
SGI,
Filetek,
Sun,
IBM,
EMC2,
Glasshouse,
Redstor
The companies who offer this service are often those who could also act as consultants or systems integrators of own built storage solutions. Indeed the distinction between an on site outsourced system and a consultant or systems integrator commissioned own build system is a somewhat arbitrary one, arrived at in this case due to the way we have chosen to explore the options
