We use the expression 'asset management' so often now, it is easy to overlook what the words actually mean. For a broadcaster or production company, the stock of content is by far their most valuable asset. Those video files are critical to the continued success - even existence - of the business. Being a broadcaster, there is often no chance for retakes. If you are making nature documentaries, that snow leopard may not appear again for three months. If it is drama, then even if you can get the actors back for extra days, the cost makes the difference between profit and loss on the project. That is why everyone talks about resilience when they are specifying storage networks. It is crucial to consider how to mitigate data loss in the event of hardware failure. What is perhaps less well thought through is whether the resilience plans will change over the lifetime of the system. You specify performance, including resilience, when buying a storage network, and you run tests as part of the factory acceptance before signing off the final payment. But if that system is expected to be the core of your operations for, say, five or seven years, how confident are you that it will still be performing to spec in the future. Will you still have the same data security?
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