Robotic storage libraries

摘要

Television technology is becoming more sophisticated and complex, and broadcasters' resources are becoming more limited. As broadcasters deploy highly sophisticated media-storage systems, they need to fully understand, evaluate, optimize and manage the content they create and deliver. With storage devices, there is always a trade-off between access speed and the costs of the device and the physical media. Magnetic storage devices have rapidly decreased in price and increased in storage capacity, but they still cannot compete economically with tape-based systems. The capital cost for tape storage is less than 3 cents/MB, while that for high-end, magnetic-disk arrays cost about 30 cents/MB or higher. And that's just the capital cost; it doesn't include cost for the occasional maintenance of disk-storage compo- nents. (Maintenance on RAID controllers, for example, is reported to be about $7/MB.) And magnetic disks alone cannot satisfy the storage and delivery needs of broadcast applications.