Spectra Logic at IBC 2019 StorCycle

Continuing the industry tradition of the poor portmanteau product names Specta Logic released a brand new HSM and archive migration tool StorCycle (I imagine pronounced stosickler) just in time for IBC this year.

The press release has taken a strange tack in trying to persuade you that you’ve never thought of moving your media off your online storage to tape or cloud before rather than focusing on what I see as it’s most sellable feature. The fact that it can sit as a management layer on your existing scale out NAS (Avid|NEXIS, EditShare, Netapp etc.) and create a viable two tier HSM and archive with a degree of agnosticism at the archive tier (for cloud only AWS and Wasabi are mentioned).

The possibility of combining the online NAS of your choice with cheap COTS disk or cloud archive managed by a recognised enterprise vendor will be a big proposition to any small to mid-size production house to whom a fully integrated tiered storage system is out of reach.

We’ve had a few conversations recently with production companies that generate media as well as operate digital asset management operations who are looking to auto archive long life assets in their DAM while maintaining project based archive for the creative teams to avoid the nightmare of file stubs on Mac workstations running the Adobe suite. The StorCycle platform fits the bill here perfectly with rule based and project archive functions and can also manage your off-site DR strategy as a bonus.

Any enterprise tool that can intelligently move media into the cloud also becomes an interesting proposition for agile remote working. Moving a project into AWS means that you then have copies of that media available to AWS instances of Avid Media Composer or Adobe CC for your editor or artist to access from a cheap PCoIP client wherever they happen to be. Tyrell have a range of smart strategies to make cloud workflows like this easy and (more importantly) affordable and we’ll even manage them for you if you want, so call us for a chat.

Greg Abell