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SANRAD'S V-SWITCH HELPS UNIVERSITIES DIGITIZE ETHNOMUSIC VIDEOS

SANRAD Inc announced that its V-Switch is helping the University of Michigan and Indiana University in Bloomington permanently preserve libraries of videotape documenting musical and dance traditions from around the world in digital format before the content is lost forever due to degradation of age.

The Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis (EVIA) Digital Archive project is a joint effort between the two universities, with a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, to preserve the video recordings of university instructors and make them easily accessible for future teaching and research. The project utilizes a high-speed storage infrastructure built around SANRAD's iSCSI V-Switch.

Implementing an iSCSI-based SAN with the SANRAD V-Switch solved the storage and file transfer problems of the universities' initial plan. The size of the video files and the speed required to transfer the files between locations proved problematic. The V-Switch has 2 TBs of disk capacity attached on the SAN, and UM's high speed network makes its possible to write the 50mbps video files directly to the iSCSI SAN located across the campus.

"With iSCSI, as I'm encoding in real time, this stuff is going to where it belongs in real time so I don't have to set up this file transfer to run all night and secure the room so no one messes up my transfer," said Dan Hague, senior video engineer for Information Technology Central Services at the University of Michigan. "As soon as that first video is done, I just stop it and put in the next video. The time savings really start to make a difference when you have 30 instructors' lifetime work to encode."

"SANRAD's V-Switch eliminates the complexity, cost and distance problems that are inherent in ambitious projects such as the EVIA Digital Archive," said Uli Gal-Oz, SANRAD CEO. "By removing barriers associated with large file sizes, remote locations and transfer speeds, we are helping to make learning tools and educational content available to students and facility alike. In fact, campuses around the country are embracing the SANRAD iSCSI V-Switch for its performance, value and high-availability architecture."