Black Friday: Good Deals, Bad Deals and Disaster Recovery for Avid Interplay

Black Friday: Good Deals, Bad Deals and Disaster Recovery for Avid Interplay Black Friday isn't when the shops drop their prices to get in more seasonal revenue or when the normally sane people of Cardiff let it all hang out. It is not even when the 80% margin storage companies drop everything, including their integrity, to hood wink organisations to tie themselves into a storage platform that does not suit their purpose. No. Black Friday is the day that production stops at your facility and you do not have any real way to ensure business continuity. Fridays why does it always have to be Fridays!

How to Build Disaster Recovery into Avid Interplay Workflows

In a recent blog post we discussed the importance of having a live disaster recovery site and how MatrixStore Replication can help to implement a robust solution. In this post I will focus on a particular workflow affecting organisations from global broadcasters to medium sized post facilities.

Avid Interplay (PAM) is a production asset management tool used the world over but broadcast and post professionals to manage, well, their productions! Interplay is essentially a database used to track and log assets throughout the lifetime in the production process. Avid provide a form of high availability for this solution by offering a clustered version of the database. But that is where the story ends. Imagine the scenario:

Production facility I'll Be Fine Productions is producing daily soap operas, key in generating revenue for the organisation.

The facility has all the kit available to produce the content locally and the engineering team has a backup procedure in place for rushes and finished projects.

The workflows are fast turned around affairs, almost news-like in the importance of ensuring content is at hand, on demand.

Suddenly, access to the local facility is blocked by natural disaster or disruption through civil unrest or protest caused by a winter of discontent.

The engineers, who manage to get into the facility, locate the backup tapes but finding the content they need is slow, laborious and at times impossible. It's not just the rushes though but current projects, work in progress and historical content is required to keep the show on air. In the mean time endless repeats are broadcast and the reputation of the organisation dwindles with each passing hour. If only the content were available on a remote site with at least a subset of the infrastructure to keep the business going.

It doesn't have to be this way. Object Matrix has had disaster recovery built into its products since its inception. Not only does MatrixStore have built in replication but the applications that archive to MatrixStore, including DropSpot, MXFS and the FTP interface, also provide high availability options. If the local site goes down, those tools can pick up where they left off at a remote location. Immediately.

The same can be said for InterConnect, the Avid Interplay Archive application from Object Matrix. If disaster strikes the engineers can use InterConnect to browse clips at the remote location choosing only the clips they want to work on and check those into an existing or clean Avid Interplay instance. That's it. Editors can gain access to their clips within minutes and hours rather that days and weeks. Object Matrix also provide tools to automatically backup the Avid Interplay database into a MatrixStore vault so that too can be replicated.

To learn more about how Object Matrix can help implement your disaster recovery strategies for production workflows please do get in touch.

Avid Interplay is either a registered trademark or trademark of Avid Technology, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries.

LINK:	http://www.matrixstore.net/2014/11/28/black-friday-good-deals-bad-deal...
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