OASYS Automated Playout, Disk Archive Corp form strategic alliance

OASYS Automated Playout Limited, a supplier of IT-based automation playout software, has formed a strategic alliance with Disk Archive Corporation, a provider of disk based archive solutions.

“At OASYS we believe in pioneering innovative and reliable solutions to meet our clients’ specific playout needs,” says Fraser Jardine, VP global sales at OASYS. “As our clients scale-up the number of channels they playout using OASYS Player, and build larger and larger catalogues of media, so the need for a cost-effective, media archive managed solution has grown. Forming a strategic alliance with Disk Archive Corporation allows us to offer our clients a modern, scalable and reliable media archiving solution for their playout facility that is fully integrated with our playout solutions.”

ALTO is based on a variant of the MAID architecture with totally independent control of each disk in a densely packed array of affordable “green” drives which are designed to support spin-down operation. Any individual disk which is not reading or writing is switched off, saving power and greatly extending disk life. The result is a cost-effective alternative to a data tape library with fast access, no planned maintenance and higher security than simple RAID storage. It provides an ideal archive for transmission-ready content in multi-channel playout environments supporting removable media for vault storage, media transportation and disaster recovery.

The ALTO Content Library is used by OASYS as the central shared storage between OASYS Player servers. The OASYS Media Library indexes all the content stored on the ALTO, creating a metadata XML for each media file. OASYS Media Manager manages the movement of media files to the OASYS Player servers as demanded by each channel’s schedule.

“We are delighted to combine the benefits of the ALTO Content Library with that of the OASYS Player through our strategic alliance with OASYS,” states Alan Hoggarth, CEO at Disk Archive Corporation. “The combined value proposition that the two companies offer is convincing and powerful, replacing the traditional data tape library with ALTO to deliver a fully secure tapeless workflow with superior performance, high availability and much lower total cost of ownership integrated with the best in IT-based software playout.”