Amplidata is presenting the AmpliStor active archive solution at IBC 2011 in Amsterdam this week. Similar to our experience at NAB in Las Vegas earlier this year, the response to our story is very positive. In case you didn’t know, Amplidata enables companies to build active archives that provide instant access to their archived media files. Apart from presenting our own products, the show has been an interesting learning opportunity.

One use case that I found particularly interesting, is that of UEFA: someone who used to work at EUFA until very recently explained to me that the Union of the European Footbal Associations has built a 100% disk based archive that replaces the tape libraries they were operating before. According to my source, for EUFA there is no such thing as dead data so they kicked out their tapes altogether. The archive will contain over 200000 hours of footage, lots of it HD – my guess is this could easily be 50PB. Unfortunately it’s not AmpliStor storage (yet), but who knows, someone at UEFA might want to improve the efficiency and increase the availability one day).

So why is tape no longer the medium of choice for EUFA? Because of the opportunities tapes bring. Imagine a EUFA game being broadcast on tv. At one point, a camera registers Michel Platini in the audience: the editor can at that point search the archive on keywords Platini and goal, he or she will immediately get an overview of all the available footage where Platini was scoring goals during his career as a player. Within minutes, a short fragment of that can be shown, e.g. during the preparation of the next free kick.

Another use case for the EUFA archive is to make the footage available to tv-stations across the world for documentaries, talk shows in preparation of a game etc. Technically this would be possible with tape libraries but think of how much more easy it is when tv stations can just search the archive online.

Or how about the clubs? Think of how valuable the EUFA archive is for scouting purposes, training aids, production of club fan DVDs etc. The online archive can give access to any club or any company contracted by a club.

While tape as a medium has plenty of benefits, think about tape not consuming power when lying on the shelf, I found this an interesting use case of disk-only archives. Sometimes tape is just too slow and disk is the only option. As these disk archives keep growing (think of the number of EUFA games each year), cost-efficient and highly reliable disk storage archives such as Amplidata’s AmpliStor will become a standard in the media industry.