Cost per Terebyte

The power that comes with digitally edited media also comes with a price: the file formats and the storage requirements are large. Business infrastructure (which was traditionally geared towards smaller files like spreadsheets and word-processing document) found itself quickly overwhelmed with the capacities required for the storage and manipulation of digital media formats. Megabytes of storage quickly gave way to terabytes, and then petabytes as the promise of powerful editing suites quickly consumed available disk storage.

 

Companies suddenly found themselves trapped by expensive storage upgrades provided by their proprietary editing systems. They found that they couldn’t argue with signed agreements, warnings of incompatibilities and the potential for lost support if they went with alternate storage solutions. That’s when the hidden “cost per terabyte” was no longer hidden. Proprietary editing systems were “closed systems”, and as necessary storage was quickly consumed, production facilities had to pay whatever supported storage was approved by their vendors, or risk running out of space.

 

With open architecture editing solutions, “cost per terabyte” drops significantly. That’s because the storage medium isn’t subject to the whims of a proprietary system or any one vendor. It allows for the use of generic, industry standard storage arrays from well established companies like Infortrend. For production facilities leveraging digital technology, significant savings through open architecture solutions insure that data storage costs will no longer be the limiting factor or a contractual shackle of a fiscally bloated proprietary solution. A significantly lowered “cost per terabyte” through open architecture design allows companies a greater return on investment, within a dramatically shorter amount of time. Because the best editing system in the world isn’t of much use if you can’t afford the storage that goes with it.