During the last IT Press Tour #59, Antoine Simkine from DigiFilm Corporation has presented they unique solution called DigiFilm ARCHIFLIX.
It’s an interestin approach on store data on a movie film support using PIXA (Digital Visual Codes on Film) encoding.
In each frame, instead of have a picture, there are a lot of pixel that encode raw data, in a Open Standard similar to the TAR format for tapes, but with some data redoundant feature to avoid data loss in case of a frame damage.
Why this approach is unique?
- This archiving solution is WORM (Write Once, Read Many) by desing and permit a good air-gap approach
- This archiving solution is not focused on maximized stored data, but instead of maximize the data durability: a tamper-proof, readable for more than 100 years, storable at any location chosen by the customer or offered by ARCHIFLIX
- Open access retrieving by standard scanner independent of manufacturers’ agenda and technology obsolescence
- No migration, upgrades or maintenance are needed
- Simple and carbon friendly archiving, management and storage solution
- reasonable speed: allows you to retrieve this data on magnetic file at any time within 72 hours and is possible encoding and archiving 5000-10000 documents (1GB) in 5 mininutes.
ARCHIFLIX is based on the recording of visual digital codes on film, combining the advantages of analog and digital.
ARCHIFLIX currently presents itself as an alternative to traditional archiving methods of MicroForms that insead is an analog reproduction of source files: their restoration results in a raster file and not the source file (for example Tiff vs PDF) and no metadata are preserved!
Use cases
There are multiple use cases for this kind of technology, for example in the movie world, there a movie at 2k require 1.5TB.
But I want to consider the specific datacenter use case because this solution is very interesting for a 3-2-1 approach because provide both a totally different storage technology (optical instead of magnetical) and the ability to store off-line and off-site.
The LTO alternative is subject to regular migrations made necessary by the rapid recorders’ obsolescence. Today LTO 9 is not backwards compatible beyond LTO 8 for writing and LTO 7 for reading, and a new version is delivered every 2-3 years. It is very difficult for a customer to ensure that the archive provider will not, at a certain point, merge data from one LTO tape to another, as capacity increases. Particularly in the event of company bankruptcy, while servers and robots are being seized, the risk of no longer being able to access the data increases considerably over time.
