COMPANY - Clients - SCOLA

“The DAX solutions facilitate the achievement of our challenges; their team is easy to work with and always available when we need them.” Mr. Francis Lajba, CEO, SCOLA

“DAX has proven to be a good and reliable partner for SCOLA, contributing to the acceleration of our growth.” Senator David Karnes, Chairman of the Board, SCOLA

The company
SCOLA is a non-profit educational organization that receives, archives and re-transmits television programming from around the world in native languages. SCOLA receives its programs by satellite downlinks, DVD and by video tapes that are delivered to SCOLA by courier. 

The program schedule of all channels is listed on the SCOLA website and programs are broadcasted by means of satellite uplink. The SCOLA programs are available via satellite, cable TV and the Internet to students of language study, ethnic communities, and anyone seeking a global perspective.
SCOLA currently provides seven 24/7 channels of programming. An eighth channel will soon go live. 

The challenge
The key objective of SCOLA is to develop language training tools using the natural languages and dialects as spoken every day. SCOLA also develops a variety of language training tools on a continuous basis. All broadcasted material is viewed as a potential source for future training modules.

Therefore, SCOLA had decided in a very early stage to archive a substantial part of its broadcast that has resulted in the creation of an extensive broadcast archive.  This archive will need to grow on a continuous basis.

The requirements
Until mid 2007, the archiving process was done on the basis of traditional video tapes containing the analogue video signal. However, after mid 2007, all broadcasts are stored digitally.
All digital broadcasts are filed on a hard disk system which can be accessed through the SCOLA website. These files are also archived in the deep archive created by the SmartDAX Blu-ray Archive systems.

Older video files that are no longer accessed, are removed from the on-line hard disk storage, but remain available in the deep archive. This way, users are able to view each and every video file from the digital archive. In the future, the existing video tape archive, containing selected broadcasts as far back as 1993, will be ingested in the digital archive making this old video material also available to every SCOLA subscriber.

Solution
SCOLA’s IT infrastructure is powered by First National Technology Solutions (FNTS) and hosted in the FNTS data centre in Omaha.The infrastructure consists of fast networking hardware, fast hard disk storage and a variety of servers.

As mentioned earlier, the on-line hard disk archive provides immediate data access through the SCOLA website. DAX File & Folder Archive Software (FFA) is used to automate the complete archiving process. Archival and restore commands are generated by the asset management software using the XML Automation Module.
 
The near-line archive is created by means of several SmartDAX Blu-ray Jukeboxes that operate in parallel. Duplicates for off-site disaster recovery are created by means of Blu-ray Duplicators that burn and label duplicate discs fully unattended and automatically. This whole setup can be scaled up further, simply by adding more units to the network, facilitating continued growth in capacity and speed.

The key advantages for SCOLA are:

1. Infinitely expandable archive. The archive grows as a direct consequence of SCOLA’s every day
    broadcast.

2. No need for data migrations for many years to come thanks to the Blu-ray standard.
    Any Blu-ray drive can read a CD that was created 20 years ago!

3. Robust archival setup combining immediate on-line retrieval, near-line archiving and off-line disaster
    recovery. Duplicate labelled Blu-ray discs are also being stored at an off-site location.

4. Low-cost, green solution. Data is migrated from the on-line storage (Pillar NAS; requiring approx. 50-75 
    W/TB) to the smartDAX system requiring less than 5W/TB. By taking also the reduction in required cooling
    power, the resulting savings on an annual basis are quite substantial, proving that Green IT is becoming
    an economic factor in addition to being ‘just’ an environmental issue.

See for more information:
• SmartDAX Blu-ray Archive
• DAX File and Folder Archive Software
• www.scola.org