Video archive solution?

Question

We are a community TV station, looking to improve our video archive. Currently we archive our master files on external drives. But to make the archive easier to access, both for saving and re-using, we are looking into a network-based solution.We have a gigabit network and currently use about 18.5 TB (our exported files for broadcast already reside on another NAS). But we likely will need at least 30TB for now (we have about 34TB worth of disks available).My question is, how to we best set up this archive, to make it available over LAN? RAID5? Do we need a RAID controller or can we get away with some kind of software/motherboard/PCIe RAID, as it's only for archiving? Is it better to buy a dedicated NAS solution, or to set up our own server with a good amount of swap drive slots? Or would we even need a SAN?About six editing computers will on a more or less regular basis archive/backup to this archive server.Our budget is pretty tight, so we're looking for a cheap, yet efficient solution.Although we currently use Google Spreadsheets to track what's on each disk, a media asset management solution would probably be a nice addition to this as well :)Thanks!

Answer 1

To be totally NetFlix compatible I need a fully dedicated HARDWARE, TRIPLE Redundant system. Stored at (3)-different facilities. I suggest you do the same. Anything software based will EAT you in the future. Ask yourself this question. If we lose the data can we afford the loss? What is its cost to us, compared to just doing the right thing.