It was the end of an another incredible weekend as the
team counted out and labeled 16 tapes and inserted
them into the aging 25-tape LTO-5 system.
Each weekend at Fellowship Church 10 to 25 Terabytes
of new video, audio, and graphics were created,
ingested, processed, and then archived to tape. The
archiving work-flow is manual, time consuming, and has
a very “analog way of working" feeling to it, given it is
2017. More troubling, the amount of digital media is
increasing and the entire process was taking more and
more time each week.
Once the archive jobs are kicked off, everyone can go
home for the night and hope the tape backup process
completes without errors by morning.
Fellowship Church, is one of the
largest and most progressive
churches in the United States.
Video is an integral part of their
immersive experience. Dave
Clark, Director of Media and
Technology, and Matt Timmons,
Digital Architect are responsible
for not only creating the content
but also wrangling terabytes of
digital media each week.
Video production at Fellowship Church is non-stop as digital content from Church services as well
as other sources is ingested, edited, and stored on their local SAN. Each week, producers and
technicians deliver the “Weekend Experience”, a one-hour for broadcast show, along with an
ever increasing variety of other programs. Their “season” is 52 weeks long each year.
They keep the final version of each program and video they produce on their SAN, along with the workproduct
and related files. Previously, they would archive these projects to their LTO library using their
LTO-5 system, amassing over 1 petabyte of tape storage over the last several years. As the tape library
grew, the archived files were less and less accessible as it took longer and longer to locate and restore any
specific file. Faced with having to upgrade their aging LTO-5 system and migrate their data, or expand
their SAN to keep more active video, Fellowship Church decided to look at cloud storage.
For Dave and Matt, the primary drivers in choosing a cloud storage vendor were data accessibility and
affordability. They selected Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage. They began by replacing the LTO workflow with
a combination of GoodSync and Backblaze B2. GoodSync is configured to identify new and changed files
as they land on the SAN and archives them up automatically to Backblaze B2. Afterwards, files can be
safely removed as desired to thin out the SAN. Now media files that were previously backed up to tape
once a week were now stored in B2 with minimal effort.
"Replacing LTO with
Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
was an easy decision."
Fellowship Church was able to replace
their weekly pain of archiving their data
to tape with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage
and GoodSync. This solution stored their
data off-site, provided them immediate
access to their archived media files, and
was amazingly affordable. Even better,
the team no longer wasted hours each
week arranging files into tape-digestible
groups and baby-sitting temperamental
tape machines. Instead, they can focus
more of their time on creating a unique
and compelling Weekend Experience 52
weekends a year.
