Archiware & Disk Archive
Archiware’s P5 Archive and ALTO provide a high-availability, green archive solution via a certified S3 COLD interface, replacing LTO tape with secure and quickly accessible disk based archive storage.
The collaboration between Archiware and Disk Archive Corporation (DAC) brings together powerful data management and highly sustainable, long-term digital preservation. As media professionals handle unprecedented volumes of high-resolution content, maintaining a secure, searchable, and cost-effective archive is critical for modern production pipelines.
Archiware’s flagship P5 Archive software now features certified native integration with DAC’s ALTO platform via its secure S3 COLD interface. This combined solution offers media organizations a robust, eco-friendly alternative to traditional LTO tape libraries and public cloud storage. By pairing P5's flexible data lifecycle orchestration with ALTO’s spin-down disk technology, users can easily archive, index, and retrieve assets. This integration eliminates the mechanical vulnerabilities of tape robotics and guards against the unpredictable egress fees associated with public cloud infrastructure.
Key Benefits
Seamless S3 Connectivity: The certified S3 COLD interface establishes an open-standard connection between Archiware P5 and ALTO for rapid deployment.
MAM-Like Asset Discovery: P5 Archive provides a visual media catalog with metadata tagging, search fields, and automatic proxy generation for fast asset identification.
Maximum Eco-Efficiency: ALTO’s advanced spin-down disk architecture reduces energy consumption to 0.25 W/TB, dropping overhead and minimizing carbon footprints.
Zero Egress Fees: Avoid the hidden network retrieval penalties of public cloud providers with predictable on-premises or datacenter operational costs.
Extended Hardware Lifespan: Powering down idle disks limits mechanical wear and tear, stretching drive longevity up to 10 years.
Flexible Scale & Security: Scale dynamically from a 50 TB workgroup system up to multi-petabyte environments protected by configurable replication strategies.
"By certifying our P5 Archive platform with Disk Archive’s S3 COLD interface, we are offering media teams a seamless way to modernize their infrastructure. This combined solution reduces complexity and public cloud overhead with immediate visibility, long-term reliability, and remarkable energy savings."
— Dr. Marc M. Batschkus, Director of Business Development, Archiware
About the Integration
The integration resolves the challenge of "Cold Data" management: balancing the security of long-term retention with immediate asset discoverability. Traditional archives force teams to choose between expensive online tiers or sluggish tape arrays that delay retrieval.
The integrated solution uses Archiware P5 Archive to treat the ALTO storage platform as an active, secure nearline repository via the S3 COLD interface.
-
Ingest & Proxy Generation: When data is moved into P5 Archive, the system generates low-resolution visual proxies for immediate browsing while moving the high-resolution masters onto the ALTO array.
-
Automated Preservation: P5 uses open storage standards to write data directly to ALTO, where custom replication policies distribute files across independent disks instead of standard rigid RAID configurations.
-
Instant Spin-Up Retrieval: When a user identifies an asset in the P5 interface, the platform signals ALTO to spin up the specific drive holding that file, bringing it back online in seconds without mechanical tape delays.
The Customer Perspective: ALTO + P5
The Customer Perspective: ALTO + P5
For editors, archivists, and production managers, the underlying archive infrastructure operates quietly behind the scenes. From the unified Archiware P5 interface, team members can search decades of historical footage as easily as local production storage.
This combination gives businesses the responsiveness of an active digital library alongside the low cost profile of deep archival storage. Customers benefit from complete data sovereignty, an optimized total cost of ownership, and a green technology approach that fits modern corporate sustainability goals.
About Archiware
Archiware Headquartered in Munich, Germany, Archiware is a leading manufacturer of platform-independent data management software for backup, synchronization, and archiving. Optimised for the media and entertainment industry, Archiware’s flagship P5 software suite ensures maximum data security and lifecycle management. The platform allows hundreds of media organizations worldwide to seamlessly protect, search, and restore their digital assets across disk, tape, and cloud storage tiers. https://www.archiware.com/solutions/disk-archive-corporation
About Disk Archive Corporation
Disk Archive Corporation (DAC) specializes in high-availability, high-security enterprise archives. Their ALTO family of products is designed specifically for the media and entertainment industry as a high-performance, low-cost alternative to LTO tape and Cloud storage, with over 500 systems deployed globally. Please contact Disk Archive for more information.