Data SheetIBM Global Business Services Media and Entertainment

Smarter Media Enterprise

IBM Archive and Essence Manager the enterprise-wide essence managementThe challenges for storing, managing, and protecting media assets have changed fundamentally with the advent of file-based production systems. The need for flexible and constantly changing digital and file-based workflows demand a storage and essence-management solution that supports and enables transparent and collaborative storage and workflows across traditional information silos (news, post production, web, etc.).

Every department should be able to work with its own tools and front ends, targeted for their daily business, but using the same media infra-structure in the back end, givenrights controlledaccess to all assets across the enterprise.

Long-term preservation of assetslonger than the usual lifetime of a content management system and its workflowsis vital to securing content value. High-definition, 3D, and interactive content require easily scalable solutions that make effective use of the media enterprise resources with regard to both storage capacity and system bandwidth.

OverviewIBM Archive and Essence Manager (AREMA, formerly known as IBM ADMIRA) is a multiformat essence management application focused on orchestration of file-based workflows and archiving of media files in the broadcasting area. AREMA acts as middleware and provides its services via SOAP, REST, FIMS, and other well-known interfaces to controlling applications such as content/asset management systems, production systems, editorial systems, archive databases, web content management systems, or broadcast automation systems.

While a media asset management system (MAM, CMS, DAM, etc.) usually contains all the descriptive information (metadata) and provides the user interfaces and the business workflows, AREMA provides the functionality and technical workflows related to the media objects (essences), such as import, transfer, archive, and export.

AREMA receives requests via its interfaces to execute jobs, which define the tasks and their order of execution by AREMA. The functionality provided within these tasks is implemented as agents that run distributed in the storage and media infrastructure. AREMA currently offers more than 70 different agents that perform any kind of media-related activity

Highlights

Flexibility: Increaseworkflowandinfrastructure flexibilitywithenterprise-widemanage-mentofmediaflowsandarchivedfileswithspecificsupportformediaessences(mediafiletypes)

Cost: Optimizestorageandcostsbyusingashared,highlyscalable,open-standards-basedstoragepoolandcentralizedworkfloworchestrationformediaflowswhichallowsuserstostartsmallandscaleasandwhenrequired

Interoperability: Enablerealportabilitybetweendigital archivesandwithinfile-basedworkflowswithself-describingdatatapesusingtheLinearTapeFileSystem

Integration: Eliminateislandsofcontentbyintegratingyoursystemsintoflexibleworkflow servicesaccessiblebyopeninterfacestoenterpriseapplications

Data SheetIBM Global Business Services Media and Entertainment

such as archive and restore, transfer, transcoding, quality check or metadata extraction both in the video and in the audio domain. Some of these agents implement interfaces to industry-leading applications such as Rhozet Carbon Coder, Telestream, or Signiant, and other agents implement their functionality on their own. The modularity of the agent-based architecture and the flexibility of the XML- and XSL-definable job execution flow are the foundation of the benefits that a media enterprise can realize using IBM Archive and Essence Manager.

IBM Archive and Essence Manager provides specific support for tape storage systems, in particular IBM Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) and IBM Linear Tape File System (LTFS), using either LTO or IBM Enterprise tapes. For both tape storage systems, AREMA offers frame-accurate partial file restore for many broadcast formats, including XDCAM HD, and optimized tape and drive resource management. For LTFS, AREMA provides specific features such as management of tapes in large automated tape libraries using the IBM LTFS Library Edition, support for multiple LTFS nodes and multiple libraries for scalability and grouping of files in storage pools providing configurable placement and copy rules and the auto mation of tape management tasks such as importing and exporting of tapes into/from the library and space reclamation.

In order to best support broadcast production and play-out workflows, IBM Archive and Essence Manager has been inte grated with many well-known broadcast products such as Omneon and Harris video servers and storage, automation systems from Harris and other vendors, and many Media Asset Management systems, such as those from Arvato Systems S4M, Avid, and Vizrt.

In particular for Avid products, AREMA has implemented a broad range of interfaces such as archiving editing projects with or without Avid Interplay Archive; importing and expor ting clips into/from Interplay PAM making use of Avid AMT, Transfer Manager and Interplay Web services; providing support for AVC-I by an own DHM for the Transfer Manager, and integrating with Avid Interplay MAM via an Interplay MAM Essence Service.

While AREMA is mainly intended to offer its services as flexible and configurable middleware, it also offers graphical interfaces to operate in a stand-alone modeeither for small enterprises or for disaster or maintenance operation. In order to identify the media essences, AREMA not only extracts and holds the technical metadata of an essence, but also holds a set of configurable custom descriptive metadata and allows searching for this data. AREMA also offers a frame-accurate proxy player for MPEG-4/H.264 that can be inte grated into a customers application.

Typical IBM AREMA installation

Editor Newsroom Search

Storage ManagementIBM Tivoli Storage ManagerIBM Linear Tape File SystemOnline,nearlinestorage

Essence Management

IBM AREMA - Workfloworchestration - Mediatransformationandtransfer - Consistencycheckswithmetadata - Mediatransactionsupport - Tapequalitymanagement

Figure 1: IBM AREMA Essence Management position in the layer between content and storage management

Metadata

Metadata legacy system - Overallarchiveviewincluding offlineassets - Primarysearchinterface - Mediafileidentificationsystem

Content management/ production system - Productionsupportforeditors/ localstorage - Workflow - Newsfeeds

Content Management

Data SheetIBM Global Business Services Media and Entertainment

IBM Archive and Essence Manager is offered in an Enterprise Edition with full functionality and in several Archive Manager Editions, which package certain functionalies to meet lower budget requirements. As an important point, AREMA is licensed by functional unit and server nodes, not by any volume factor.

BenefitsPurposeEssence workflow and archive processes are carried out asyn-chronously in the background. AREMA uses its ability to read most media file formats in order to carefully manage and monitor jobs to ensure they are stored in the right place, with the right format, without any errors and at the best possible performance.

Performance and StabilitySeveral separate instances of IBM Archive and Essence Manager agents run on separate systems to provide scalability. Central media services can be run simultaneously on several servers.

OpennessThe services offered by AREMA can be used by any application requiring essence and storage management. AREMA offers extensive and high-level web services based API. Several market-leading broadcast applications have already been integrated with IBM AREMA, such as Vizrt Ardome, Avid Interplay Media Asset Manager and Avid Interplay Production Asset Manage-ment, Arvato Systems S4M VPMS, SGT MAM, Harris ADC automation, Abit automation, SCS Faro, and others.

Optimization of Storage ResourcesInstead of per-system access to essence management services and storage areas of different content management systems, AREMA can be used to offer these services for all CMSs. This optimizes the storage usage and its operation.

CostsIBM Archive and Essence Manager runs on standard hard-ware using the Linux Operating System, IBM Java and IBM DB2 or Informix database, or Oracle database. It supports any disk storage system and distributed LAN or SAN file system that runs on Linux. A mix of online and nearline storage provides an optimal overall balance between fast access and cost effectiveness.

Figure 2: AREMA Workflow Builder Client

Data SheetIBM Global Business Services Media and Entertainment

ComponentsIBM Archive and Essence Manager consists of several logical components.

InterfacesThe commands to launch media-processing workflows such as archive/restore or transfer, monitor their execution, and query the content of the archive are exposed as web services via SOAP or REST communications. In order to launch such an operation, a set of parameters and a reference to a job template are passed to the service. The job templates define the data flow in detail and can be easily customized via XML/XSL. In addition, IBM can provide a compliant interface for the Framework for Interoperable Media Services (FIMS) from the American Media Workflow Association (AMWA) and the European Broadcast Union (EBU) as this standard evolves. IBM Archive and Essence Manager also integrates seamlessly with the IBM Media Enterprise Framework and the IBM Smarter Media Workflow offerings. Another option to inter-face AREMA with a file system is the AREMA Watchfolder, which monitors directories for newly added files and then cre-ates job descriptions for AREMA based on job templates. It ca