Museum of Broadcast Communications Trusts Cleversafe With Terabytes of Digitized Radio and Television Content

Museum of Broadcast Communications Trusts Cleversafe With Terabytes of Digitized Radio and Television Content

CHICAGO, Jan. 27 /PRNewswire/ -- The Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications (MBC) and its website http://www.museum.tv/ is reporting seamless storage and delivery online of more than 5 Terabytes of digitized radio and television content to an audience of more than 20,000 registered members globally -- all thanks to Cleversafe's Dispersed Storage(R) technology.

Due to its size, digital and unstructured data is challenging and expensive to store. Cleversafe's technology avoids the cost and inefficiency of traditional storage systems based on replication by dividing data into "slices" and dispersing them, via secure network connections, to multiple storage nodes on a Dispersed Storage Network (dsNet). Each individual slice contains too little information to be useful, but any threshold of the slices can be used to perfectly recreate the original data. Moreover, the sum capacity of all the slices is significantly less than maintaining multiple copies of the original data, making data management easier and less expensive.

Since its inception in 1987, the not-for-profit MBC's goal has been to collect, preserve, and present a wide array of historic and contemporary radio and television programming. Through the years, the primary challenge MBC faced was the lack of resources to put together a large enough storage infrastructure to handle the massive amount of digital and unstructured data they had and needed to present. When their single-server storage setup didn't foot the bill, they had to suspend their online services.

When Cleversafe CEO and MBC member Chris Gladwin received an e-mail about this, he reached out to MBC.

"Our technology is designed to safely but effectively store and distribute massive amounts of digital content, and it does so at 1/3 the cost and with 1/3 of the footprint of other storage solutions," said Gladwin. "MBC provides a valuable service to the public by allowing them a peek into history, and we offered them a way to keep their cause alive without breaking the bank."

MBC began working with Cleversafe in November 2008, storing their data across four dispersed locations to provide digital content to Internet users around the world. In addition to using Cleversafe to store their data, MBC also relies on the technology for distribution rather than implementing a separate content delivery network (CDN). When users view content on the MBC website, the data is pulled directly from Cleversafe and displayed via a media server in front of the Cleversafe hardware, saving MBC money and physical space without sacrificing performance or scalability for their end users.

Moreover, because of Cleversafe's data distribution methods and fault-tolerant system -- up to sixteen 9's of reliability -- MBC never needs to worry about the preservation of its digital assets, even if the 5 Terabytes of data currently stored grows tenfold as expected over the next few years.

"For our initiative, effective storage and archiving is a must," said Bruce DuMont, founder and president of MBC. "Signing up with Cleversafe was a no-brainer. It's the most secure option available, and it gave us a way to store and distribute our content -- really, our bread and butter -- within our budget. And, because of the money we saved both on the solution itself and on not needing a separate CDN, we can now afford to continue digitizing our remaining content, making our presentations better for our viewers. We see our relationship with Cleversafe as long-term and are confident that their technology will serve us well as our pool of data and our infrastructure grows."

For more information about MBC, please visit http://museum.tv/.

About Cleversafe:

Cleversafe enables the world to confidently and cost-effectively store and distribute limitless amounts of data. The company's award-winning Dispersed Storage(R) technology solves the scalability, security and longevity problems of traditional storage methods based on replication. Learn more about Cleversafe's storage solutions at http://www.cleversafe.com/ or http://www.cleversafe.org/.

Source: Cleversafe

CONTACT: Lindsay Mecca of Page One PR, +1-415-321-2343,
Lindsay@pageonepr.com, for Cleversafe

Web site: http://www.cleversafe.com/

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