The Forefront Of Archive Innovation

SGL is a leading provider of content archive and storage management software for multiple business sectors including broadcast, post production, news, sports and government.

Its reliable, flexible content archive and storage management solutions are utilised by thousands of clients across the globe.

SGL's FlashNet is the result of over 20 years of leading-edge content archive software development. Regardless of the size or environment, FlashNet's clustered architecture and open approach provides secure, futureproof business solutions that grow with the customer. This summer SGL launched its new entry-level archive system, FlashNet Lite. Available in two configurations – FL Disk and FL Hybrid – FlashNet Lite provides customers with disk only content storage or a combination of disk and tape.

Running on a single server node, FlashNet Lite can grow as the customer's archive expands. FlashNet Lite includes important FlashNet tools such as integration with a wide range of partner solutions and storage devices; business storage rules; partial file restore; and SGL's new sophisticated Infinity user interface.

Providing broadcasters and content owners with an elegant dashboard that simplifies the management of media archives, Infinity delivers a sophisticated toolset for archive and restore functionality, system health, monitoring, analysis and more. It is available as a free upgrade to all SGL FlashNet users covered by a current support contract who are running FlashNet 6.6 or later.

While FlashNet itself is optimised for enterprise-level archiving, with the capability for automatic fail-over and for distributed processing of very high levels of activity, Infinity is designed for high-performance search, monitoring and analysis. To manage the sometimes conflicting objectives of very efficient throughput and equally efficient data analysis, the processing and database demands of FlashNet and Infinity are managed separately. Two separate but connected SQL Server databases store FlashNet's transactional information and Infinity's metadata and summary data. The two databases can be run on the same or separate servers, depending on requirements.

Infinity is a web-based framework that runs dashboards containing gadgets. Each gadget offers a tool, which SGL groups into searching, monitoring, analysing and system administration categories. Some dashboards are pre-configured by SGL as system-defined and others can be created by the organisation by dragging and dropping gadgets. All dashboards can be modified to fit the organisation, depending on user access rights.

There are several benefits to this approach. First, Infinity can be configured to work exactly as needed by the particular organisation or user. Secondly, SGL can easily roll out additional gadgets to FlashNet customers over time, with each site determining how they will introduce them. A third benefit of this technology framework is that each gadget can be embedded within the user interfaces of SGL's partners' solutions.

SGL continues to work in collaboration with the other major vendors in the broadcast industry to provide its customers with industry-leading archive management solutions utilising the latest technological advances. As workflows utilise the cloud more fully, as new standards emerge, as disaster recovery models become more sophisticated, SGL's FlashNet will continue to stay at the forefront of innovation.

Image: Infinity user interface.

This article is by Lee Sheppard, Director of Product Management, SGL.

www.sglbroadcast.com

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 42.

(JP)