The development of new digital storage media is ever increasing and the breadth of these offerings is widening. Historically, archive systems have been proprietary and these circumstances have led to a lack of interchange of stored archives and lack of interoperability of archive systems. A group of industry protagonists have set out to convince the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) for the need to standardise.
Thanks to technology, we’ve now got more ways than ever to communicate with each other through audio, video and the printed word. However, the same proliferation of technology that creates so much opportunity also has resulted in a plethora of formats and systems for storing digital media – from small to extremely large.
Sadly, often all these formats and systems are not all compatible with each another – one was created on PC, the other on Mac. But we are not talking about interoperability of the media files themselves, rather the actual operating system, file system, storage technology and devices used to capture, store and protect these valuable media assets.
This diversity and potential long term incompatibility makes reliable and guaranteed access to these assets complicated, expensive and sometimes downright impossible.
Solving the problem means establishing a common format for digital media storage that works not only with any existing system, but also with systems that have yet to evolve – an open standard for the long term storage and preservation of media assets.
AXF
Development is well on its way with the Archive eXchange Format (AXF), which is intended to serve as a common language in the archiving industry. AXF is a file and storage media agnostic encapsulation approach which abstracts the underlying file system, operating system and storage technology making the format truly open and non-proprietary.
The AXF object contains any type, any number and any size of files as part of its payload accompanied by any amount and type of structured or unstructured metadata, checksum and provenance information, full indexing structures and more; all in a single, fully self described, encapsulated package.
As the AXF object itself contains a complete file system, all of the complexities and limitations of the underlying storage is avoided and the same AXF object can exist on data tape, spinning disk, flash, optical media, or other storage technology now and into the future.
Key features of the AFX include scalability, where AXF objects can scale to any size, encapsulate any number of component files of any size or any type and can span across any number of storage medium devices or technologies. It offers resilience with in-built features such as media cataloguing and fast index recovery, fully self-described objects as well as per file and structure checksums assistance to ensure long term accessibility and resilience.
Openness
AXF is totally open, it offers support for all storage media types (hard drive, optical, flash) without reliance on modern data tape features such as LTFS partitioning, so there is no need to upgrade existing storage infrastructures. In addition community tools will soon be available to allow for generic and direct access to AXF formatted media and AXF objects without relying on the applications that created them.
Designed to support all media and file types regardless of operating system (file system or platform) and based on an IT-centric implementation, which supports any type of file encapsulation (database files, documents, image files); it is therefore not limited to only media assets.
AXF was developed to meet a broad spectrum of user needs – anyone who works with any type of file based content and needs to store, transfer, protect, preserve or access their content across various technologies can benefit from AXF. Applications range from people and companies that work within the entertainment and media industry that access petabytes of data in a high-performance environment down to the person who needs to transfer or store a few files.
As we head further down the widening road of the digital highway, the development of the Archive eXchange Format will no doubt save our assets from getting lost in a mountain of aged, incompatible hard drives and DVDs. The bottom line is that AXF has the ability to support interoperability among systems, help ensure long-term accessibility to valued assets and keep up with evolving storage technologies.
It offers profound present and future benefits for any enterprise that uses media – from broadcasters, to museums and libraries, to simple IT-based operations and family home movies – it is well on its way to being the long-awaited worldwide open standard for file-based archiving, preservation and exchange.
By Ian Dormer
Screen Africa Magazine March 2012
