Perifery at IBC: Synergizing with Seagate

We launched a special show podcast to capture the insights and perspectives from several media industry leaders at IBC 2023. In this episode, Jonathan Morgan, SVP Product & Technology, is joined by David Thompson, EMEA Systems Sales Manager at Seagate.  

Jonathan starts the conversation by asking David how many times he has visited the IBC, whether he has seen many changes over the years, and his thoughts on this year’s event. Sharing that he’s attended somewhere between ten and twenty shows, David highlighted the new and interesting technologies and people seen each year: a winning combination for an interesting and diverse event.

Speaking of IBC’s trending themes, Jonathan stated that the 2023 show seemingly centered around artificial intelligence. He noted that Seagate had begun to embrace AI technology and asked David to explain how it relates to the company’s storage solutions, especially in terms of data generation. David responded, “Data growth at the moment is exponential and it is never ceasing. Every year, more and more data is generated. Some of it is stored, a lot of it isn't stored, and where Seagate come into that is we aim to enable that storage more completely, more and more, as we can.”

Jonathan and David continued to discuss data creation, storage, and management, at the edge. The pair both agreed that there is a growing desire and need across the media and entertainment sector to process data where it is generated. Jonathan shared Perifery’s take on the subject, “With all of the cameras, with all of the coverage, with all of the format changes which go increasingly towards 8K and even beyond at times, there's just too much data to be processed in the cloud,” he continued, “getting it there is expensive and processing it there is expensive, and sometimes being able to do that in facility or at the edge can be a big benefit.”

David agreed, saying, “we're completely aligned with that. We see lots and lots of data creation at the edge, especially at the moment, especially in this industry. And to be able to work with Perifery to kind of help solve and manage that data in that environment and then move it to the right environment is invaluable.”

Next on the agenda was the Perifery and Seagate relationship. Perifery’s Object Matrix and Swarm object storage technologies have recently been integrated with the XSAP and Corvault platforms from Seagate. Explaining the benefits of using Corvault with object storage, David said, “We've got some very, very unique technologies within Corvault.” He shared that Corvault has specific features for handling an ever-increasing growth of data, such as ADAPT technology for faster rebuilds and ADR for self-healing drives.

Jonathan highlighted the immutability of objects in object storage, which provides complete protection against ransomware. David added that Seagate's drives are encrypted by default, and Jonathan expanded on the importance of this feature: “having the encryption at that level of the Corvault means that you don't need to do the encryption at the object storage layer, which can reduce the CPU load required or the CPU configuration that is required by up to 40%.” He continued, “So, what you're doing is bringing down the cost of the service that you are required, significantly. You're speeding up the processing of the data or the transfer of the data onto the storage, having guarantees at a really fundamental level about the security at multiple layers. Put that all together and you reduce costs, you reduce even the environmental impact, and you get excellent performance throughout.”

David agreed, adding, “And we begin to help the customers save some money at the end of the day, and those sort of technologies, encryption, offloading, load from the host side of things, is always important.” He concluded the conversation by highlighting that the Seagate and Perifery technologies were a great fit.