At Falcon Technologies International we firmly believe in lasting and mutually beneficial partnerships. During the last decade we have managed to establish a number of such relationships, resulting in strategic market partnerships on the global scale.
One such partnership that has helped us to gain a significant market share in Europe is with UK-based company River Pro Audio.
River Pro Audio have always prided themselves on the quality, consistency and innovation of the products they stock and services they deliver. Naturally, championing a manufacturer who shares those ideals (and delivers on them!) was an easy decision to make.
As the official distributor for Falcon Media in Europe and the largest stockist, we have in partnership achieved a huge amount of conversions and, the bottom line, a huge amount of happy customers.
This partnership couldn’t have come at a better time; with Taiyo-Yuden bowing out of the optical industry, many European clients were in-between brands, with nowhere to turn to for high quality, reliable media. This push towards Falcon Media was a dramatic success and has secured their position in Europe as a high-end supplier of optical media.
As well as optical discs, River Pro Audio also manufactures and stocks a full range of casing. Well recognised in Europe under the ‘River’ range, these cases are made to the highest standards. Using nothing but virgin prime resin and high-end Japanese moulds, these cases are meticulously quality controlled to ensure they’re the best in the world.
By working in partnership with all major manufacturers of publishing equipment, as well as all employees being trained to an exceptionally high standard in their use and repair, River Pro Audio can also supply equipment and consumables at the lowest prices – as well as offering support and recommendations for your equipment and workflow.
It doesn’t stop here; River Pro Audio and their staff are constantly striving for improvement and will go above and beyond to assist your business or projects. For anything media related in Europe, whether that’s high quality Falcon Media, high quality casing and publishing consumables or equipment, they’re certainly the place to go.
For industry leading advice, or supply in Europe, feel free to contact your River Pro Audio Falcon representatives (Robert Butler-Ellis or Sampson Monger) on:
A New York-based team of volunteer archivists and preservationists are working to transfer old VHS videotapes into digital formats. Volunteers meet weekly in a Tribeca loft filled with “racks of tape decks, oscilloscopes, vectorscopes and waveform monitors” to painstakingly digitize cassettes from the 1980s and 1990s. As they note, transferring video isn’t plug-and-go; much tweaking and troubleshooting can be required to get it right. That’s why they’ve only managed to transfer 155 tapes so far – a very small percentage of the total analog format archive.
The group partners with artists, activists, and individuals to lower the barriers to preserving at-risk audiovisual media – especially unseen, unheard, or archived works.
Whatever the content, once it’s digitized, it becomes publicly available via the Internet Archive.
And what about your own tapes? There are plenty of paid services that will help you to digitize old videotapes – or you can do it yourself using directions from open sources. And if you still have a big dusty box of your home video tapes stored somewhere deep in the closet, it may be a good idea to transfer their contents on the new storage mediums.In fact, we have already discussed that in one of our previous articles.
Tape manufacturers predicted 20 to 30 years of life expectancy, but media lifespan depends greatly on environmental conditions. Format obsolescence contributes to the crisis: Umatic and VHS tapes are no longer manufactured and BetaSP will soon be discontinued. Machines to play these formats are becoming more scarce as are the skills to maintain and repair them.
Of course, it’s not only the videotape that’s at risk. Entropy is relentless, and anything recorded on the old storage mediums will eventually have to be transferred and digitalized. Even if the medium remains intact, formats and interfaces become obsolete and disappear. Preserving data for the long term is a discipline worth more attention than we can give it here, but a few tips might be helpful.
Lifespan comparison of different backup storage media
Keep track of how long media is likely to last – but remember that the statistics are controversial projections, and many won’t be so precise. The general consensus is that consumer segment CD-Rs should last 30 to 50 years, DVD-Rs less than that, and CD-RWs and DVD-RWs even less. Similarly, tapes and hard disks can be expected to be readable for 10 to 30 years, while portable disks, USB thumb drives, and other solid-state storage devices may survive for half that time, maybe.
Back in 2005, The New York Times reported that 3.5” floppies have “an estimated life span of 10 years if stored in a cool, dry place with average care and use”. If you’ve still got any, we’ll bet they’re older than that!
With this in mind, regularly copy data to new media, especially if it’s approaching its expiration date. And make sure anything you haven’t saved is “in a cool, dry place,” not your attic or garage. It is strongly recommended to use a specialized archival optical media, like FalconMedia Century Archival, which are able to secure your data for up to 500 years.
Move away from physical formats that are becoming obsolete. For example, many people who used to back up their data on Zip drives, Syquest cartridges, and 1.44MB floppy drives no longer have access to these. Even interfaces can be an issue: external devices often used serial or parallel ports that no longer ship standard on computers (though desktop PC and ExpressCard laptop adapters can still be found). Make sure you’ve migrated your data before you dispose of an old device or format.
A common related issue: data trapped on a working hard disk in a dead PC or laptop. The Guardian serves up some useful guidance on installing the drive in an external USB enclosure and restoring from there.
Migrate data from obsolete programs, or at least make sure you have the tools to do so when necessary. Millions of people still have content trapped in ancient word processing. Tools for viewing such data or move it into “living” software include Quick View Plus and FastLook; for some formats, the free LibreOffice productivity suite or XNView image viewer might be all you need.
TechRepublic offers some useful high-level advice on planning a long-term strategy for protecting your data here.
All this is great as far as it goes, but as the amount of data we’re generating continues to soar, we’re likely to need some radically new. Here are some technologies that may potentially improve data storage in near future:
Analog micro-etching: The Long Now Foundation – which specializes in trying to envision the long-term future and solve the problems it might present – ran a full conference on super-long-term data storage. The solution it found promising enough to test: analog micro-etching onto nickel disks. Eight years later, they had a prototype: a disk containing information in about 1,500 human languages, plus translations of the Book of Genesis in each. Since the information is analog, it’s readable directly by humans (though they will need a microscope).
The Arctic World Archive: Officially opened on March 27 in Norway’s Svalbard Arctic region, the for-profit Arctic World Archive is already housing key documents from Brazil, Mexico, and Norway — safe, theoretically, from natural disaster and warfare. According to a report in The Verge, data is actually imprinted on special film, in huge high-density greyscale QR codes – and the archive is completely disconnected from the Internet to protect against hackers and ransomware.
DNA: According to Science Magazine, researchers have been making breathtaking progress since the first attempts to store data in DNA molecules back in 2012. DNA is ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place. And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it – not something you can say with confidence about videocassettes or QR codes.
During last couple of decades, it is stating the obvious to say that mobile telecommunications has entirely changed the world we live in. Over this period we have gradually switched from handwritten paper contact notebooks to electronic contact records in our mobile phones, however it is not only the phone numbers we store in our phones anymore: with the development of smartphones, they became or own personal data banks.
Alongside the contacts, our small electronic friends now store so much data (passwords, photos, music, sometimes even medical records and biometric parameters etc.) that losing our device would most likely be a total disaster for one’s day-to-day routine. Some people even don’t remember their passwords from social media accounts, because their phones keep them securely stored in their memory.
Loss of that sensitive data may be a problem, but it is transfer to another device is even more problematic.
Everyone has, least once in their life, switched from one mobile phone to another. Back in 2000’s it wasn’t such a big deal: you switched the SIM card and all your data is easily transferred to the new phone. Those were the good old days when the contacts were stored on the SIM card and there was no hassle with gigabytes of photos and music. These earlier phones pretty much were meant to ring and exchange texts back then: no cameras, no players, not even mentioning the mobile internet.
It was later in 2006-2007, when the smartphone market started to emerge, the problem of data transfer between two devices became bigger when different mobile operating systems decided to develop in completely different directions.
By the beginning of 2010’s it became obvious that data transfer between Android and iOS devices became so difficult and time consuming, that leading developers could not ignore consumers’ complaints anymore, and a revolutionary step was taken.
As one of the market leaders and most innovative consumer electronics companies, Apple made iPhone owners’ life easier, by launching of the “Move to iOS” app that provided an easy way to move contacts and other data from an Android phone to an iPhone.
Google, as Apple’s biggest rivals on mobile operating systems market, developed similar technology in their own mobile device, called Pixel. They even included a dedicated adapter to make data transfer procedure easier.
According to Google, the new Pixel phones ship with a dedicated Switch capability that allows users to transfer contacts, calendar events, photos, videos, music, SMS messages, iMessages and more from one device to the other. Quick Switch Adapter technology is a dedicated On the Go adapter that is shipped within the Pixel box, which Google confirms within its Pixel specs.
Google describes the switch as a three-step process. Older phones have to run on Android 5.0 and up, or iOS 8 and above for iPhones.
If data has to be transferred from an older Android phone, the process is relatively simple. For iPhone users, they turn off iMessage and FaceTime, then remove the SIM card. Then it is required to sign into your Google Account from the Pixel. Finally, Google will ask the user to select what data needs to be imported.
Once that’s all decided, Google takes over and migrates the requested data. It’s as simple as that.
These developments are a great example of how consumers benefit from a healthy market competition and innovative thinking about how to secure personal data that smartphones carry nowadays. Anyone who is somehow related to IT industry will tell you: ALWAYS do backups of your data. No matter how secure you think all the cloud technology systems and personal hard drives are, just remember one thing: once data is lost – it is lost forever.
Therefore, as a conclusion to this article, we at Falcon Technologies International strongly recommend to use dedicated archival optical media solutions to store all the sensitive and valuable data, that you would like to keep secure for a long time. It doesn’t take too much time to burn couple of DVDs, but it will ensure that your data is insured.
Finance is an excessively regulated industry, with many moving parts and data that must be monitored and reported in order to stay protected and compliant with all regulations. One of the most important aspects of regulatory compliance for banks and financial organisations is record keeping and archiving electronic communication data. With the right tools and plans in place, archiving compliance does not have to be a daunting task.
Financial institutions generate a lot of data, which has to be archived by law.
Brokers, dealers, investment advisors, lending agents, futures and transfer agents, and businesses like mortgage companies, credit unions, banks, hedge funds, private equity firms, exchanges, commercial and retail banks, lenders and insurers, payday lenders, foreclosure relief services and debt collectors are all required to capture, monitor and archive business related communication data for review, audits, eDiscovery, litigation, and compliance.
But how do you become compliant? Let’s just jump right into the What, Why, and How of archiving compliance for banking and financial organisations.
Compliance with data archiving regulations is vital prevention of cyber crimes.
In short, a financial institution of any kind should be archiving all business related electronic communication data.
Email has been around long enough that just about everyone realizes the need to have a complete and easily accessible email archive. But you should really be archiving every bit of electronic communication data created by your organization. This includes social media, instant messaging, and content created on mobile devices.
The most obvious reason to archive emails and other business communication data is that your business is regulated and thus, mandated to do so.
Another thing that has to be archived – corporate e-mails
Another reason why you should archive, that isn’t obvious at first, is data leakage. If you have proprietary data, customer account, transactional or confidential information, you are obligated to make sure that it isn’t shared, either purposefully or accidentally. The use of email, social media, instant messaging, and mobile devices increases the ease at which your employees could share this type of data. Couple that with the fact that the line between personal and business communication is blurred on corporate mobile devices. In addition to data leakage, you need to guard against insider trading, inappropriate financial advice, and stating personal beliefs about a financial investment or trade as fact. Having an archiving solution provides you with protection against these threats by giving you oversight. This oversight on employee communication data, coupled with an effective communication policy, will not only discourage bad behavior, but will encourage proper behavior according to established policy. Your employees will know that, according to your policy, everything they communicate is being stored and can be accessed for review.
As you can see, almost every commercial entity produces and accumulates large amounts of various data on a daily basis, so the “archival question” is becoming more actual nowadays and will become even more critical in the future. Data storage and archival solutions in the age of “informational revolution” we live in are required to provide not only the big data storage and rendering capacities, but also ensure the integrity and accessibility of data for years, decades and centuries.
Falcon Technologies International LLC’s Research and Development team have created a solution that complies with the archival needs and requirements of the financial institutions and government entities. Our FalconMEDIA Century Archival CDs and DVDs with golden and platinum reflective layers showed outstanding results during the internal and third-party benchmarking tests: data stored on these professional archival discs stays accessible and integer for more than 500 years – timeframe that is enough to archive data for almost 7 future generations of the humanity.
Source: GWAVA
Technology has come a long way. We see constant development and growth in terms of computing hardware, software and storage. Although some technologists say, those gains are stalling, perhaps limited in by the physical boundary of raw materials that are used in central processing units.
Supercomputers are developing even faster than consumer-oriented computing technologies
Recently Microsoft thinks it may have found the solution namely field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). A FPGA is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by a customer or a designer after manufacturing – thus it is said to be “field-programmable”. To define the behavior of the FPGA, the user provides:
a hardware description language (HDL)
or a schematic design.
The HDL form is more optimal for large structures as you can specify them numerically rather than having to draw every piece by hand. However, schematic entry can allow for easier visualization of a design. FPGA allows you flexibility in your designs and is a way to change how parts of a system work without introducing a large amount of cost and risk of delays into the design schedule. Many designers have the false impression that building a system with a modern FPGA means you have to deal with millions of logic gates and a massive amounts of connections just to do something useful. But if that were the case, FPGA use wouldn’t be growing: Instead, there would only be about a half dozen FPGA users left. It turns out FPGA designers have done much of the heavy lifting of adding commonly needed components so all that you have to concentrate on is customizing those functions that are specific to your application. Examples of components produced by designers comprise: clock generators, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) controllers and even whole multicore microprocessors.
A Spartan FPGA from Xilinx
This type of computer chip that can be reprogrammed for specific tasks after they leave the factory floor, are adding firepower to Microsoft’s network of on-demand computing power.
What does this mean in real terms?
Using all of the power of Microsoft’s data centers worldwide, the company could translate all 5 million articles on the English language Wikipedia in less than a tenth of a second.
In the past 2 years Microsoft has quietly been installing FPGAs on the new servers; Microsoft added to its global fleet of data centers. They’re present usage includes ranking results in the Bing search engine and speed the performance of Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing network. Microsoft is alone among major cloud-computing players in widely deploying FPGA technology.
There are also implications for high performance computing and data storage such as solutions for Network Attached Storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), servers, and storage appliances.
Project Catapult is the technology behind Microsoft’s hyperscale acceleration fabric. The supercomputing substrate is built with the aim to accelerate the efforts in networking, security, cloud services and artificial intelligence.
Project Catapult combines an FPGA integrated into nearly every new Microsoft datacenter server. By exploiting the reconfigurable nature of FPGAs, at the server, the Catapult architecture delivers the efficiency and performance of custom hardware without the cost, complexity and risk of deploying fully customized ASICs into the datacenter. Moreover, the performance gain compared with CPUs is monumental and with less than 30% cost increase, and no more than 10% power increase.
Catapult FPGA Accelerator
Other FPGA Applications
Due to their programmable nature, FPGAs are an ideal for numerous markets. As the industry leader, Xilinx provides comprehensive solutions consisting of FPGA devices, advanced software, and configurable, ready-to-use IP cores for markets and applications such as:
Aerospace & Defense – Radiation-tolerant FPGAs along with intellectual property for image processing, waveform generation, and partial reconfiguration for SDRs.
Industrial – Xilinx FPGAs and targeted design platforms for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) enable higher degrees of flexibility, faster time-to-market, and lower overall non-recurring engineering costs (NRE) for a wide range of applications such as industrial imaging and surveillance, industrial automation, and medical imaging equipment.
Medical – For diagnostic, monitoring, and therapy applications, the Virtex FPGA and Spartan® FPGA families can be used to meet a range of processing, display, and I/O interface requirements.
Security – Xilinx offers solutions that meet the evolving needs of security applications, from access control to surveillance and safety systems.
Wireless Communications – RF, base band, connectivity, transport and networking solutions for wireless equipment, addressing standards such as WCDMA, HSDPA, WiMAX and others.
The advancement in computing power and storage capability combined with substantial savings and efficiency introduced through FPGA technology mean the world of supercomputing is more accessible then ever.
At the same time, the advancement of supercomputing technologies automatically means more data storage requirements. Every year world produces more and more data and therefore more and more information needs to be stored. Some information needs to be stored for more extended periods of time like 10-20-30 or even 100 years. There is no better long-term data storage mediums than archival discs.
Falcon Technologies International LLC has developed Century Archival product line, which is a cutting-edge technology with built in Gold or Platinum layers to ensure maximum security, longevity and protection for stored data.
Century Archival products are designed to secure data for hundreds of years – FTI’s Century Archival DVD product has been demonstrated in testing to be capable of storing data for up to 200 years, whereas the Century Archival CD product has demonstrated a longevity in excess of 400 years, making the Century Archival line the most durable and secure archival digital media product available in the market today.
Data storage and backups are becoming a more important, even essential, part of operations for virtually all businesses. Third-party, cloud-based storage solutions have become very popular in recent years with many industries that operate with large volumes of data, such as sound, video and graphics. But are these solutions so secure and trusted as they are marketed to be?
Cloud storage solutions such as Dropbox became very popular during last 7-8 years
Thomas Coughlin, a data storage consultant, says that two of the biggest issues for most media and entertainment companies with third-party archiving is cost and trust. When it comes to a handling of archives above a certain size, it becomes more cost-efficient to have supporting proprietary storage infrastructure in-house, rather than continue leasing it from a third party.
The issue of trust in relating to data archiving is being solved using various encryption methods, but according to Coughlin there are still many unanswered questions on long-term data security.
The other significant factor that influences companies towards proprietary data storage solutions is cost: according to the latest case study on Facebook, having data stored on optical media or magnetic tape is up to 80% cheaper than having it stored on HDD or SSD-based storages.
Freeze-Ray storage system helped Facebook to cut almost 80% of its data storage costs.
For enterprises that need to store large amounts of data that is rarely accessed, it is more important to effectively manage costs rather than getting faster performance of the storage solutions (e.g. banks, insurance companies, healthcare organisations, Governmental agencies, etc.). This is the main reason why more secure storage technologies based on optical media or magnetic tapes are more likely to be used by certain industries, Coughlin says.
Lower costs become a meaningful factor due to the difference in technology behind various types of storage systems. Optical discs and magnetic tapes do not require any electrical power when data is not accessed.
Falcon Technologies International LLC (FTI) has invested a significant portion of its resources into archival solutions development. Over a decade of continuous Research and Development, FTI achieved excellent expertise in the optical media production industry and proved its operational excellence through a number of quality certificates, such as ISO:9001 and CE.
The company firmly believes that Optical Media will re-define long-term data storage and archiving through the provision of reliable and high-quality tools, such as FTI’s latest optical disc product line Century Archival.
FTI’s Century Archival – reliable solution for long term data storage.
Century Archival discs were specially designed for long-term data storage and exceeded experts’ expectations in a number of accelerated aging tests, showing a minimum lifespan of 300 years when subject to extreme environmental conditions. Gold and Platinum layers of Century Archival ensure that all the stored data will be secured against any external environmental threats (fact proved with series of ISO/OEM Archival Tests).
Dr. Sean Farnan, Head of FTI’s Research and Development Department said: “With the exponential growth of digital data, how we handle data is becoming increasingly important. From the instant gratification to placing a picture onto an online service such as Facebook, memories from a family wedding, business accounts, medical details through to the digital reproduction of ancient manuscripts the list is long and varied. As this journey into the digital landscape continues, the importance of storing digital data over a long period of time is now a real concern. It is also an opportunity for Optical Media to deliver a long lasting, cost effective archival solution.
By using the purest materials and employing rigorous quality control during the manufacturing process, it is possible to produce high capacity optical disks that will last over 100 years and beyond. The data storage works across all formats and is easily scalable depending on the end users’ application.
From learned institutions preserving human history, to online entertainment, healthcare and the business sector, the need for permanent data storage will be met by optical media. It will also allow you to share memories such as your wedding day with your grand children. Memories are always better when shared.”
Long-term optical media archival solutions significantly cut costs according to Facebook.
Recently Facebook revealed to the media that it was transferring enormous volumes of its content archives to more cost-efficient storage: new archival solution architecture, based on optical media. Later on, after successful implementation of the technology, some of the biggest optical media industry players announced that the technology would be marketed for other businesses and new optical storage devices are being developed to carry even bigger volumes of data.
Old, but still widely used data storage device – magnetic tape.
The technology was called “Freeze-Ray” due to the specifics of its use: data is preserved in a type of storage known as “cold storage” for long periods of time and rarely accessed.
Typically, users of social networks tend to view photos that are recently uploaded: a week or two old images are accessed very often, so Facebook stores them on spinning HDD’s. At some point in time, when the pictures are no longer accessed frequently, they are relocated on high-capacity optical discs, where they are stored for years without being accessed.
The optical media industry experienced steady decline during the last decade as streaming services such as Netflix took over, but now, with the interest from Facebook and other giants, it is back to life as one of the keys to cost-cutting. Facebook says that optical media storage saves them 50% of the budget for storage solutions and is 80% more energy efficient.
Data storage facility based on HDDs
The first version of Facebook’s storage system was based on a 100GB disk. Later this year it is planned to shift to 300GB discs and some companies from the industry are already working on 500GB and 1TB versions. Single system may accommodate hundreds and even thousands of discs, providing petabytes of archival storage.
Optical media production process
In addition to being useful to business enterprises, archival storage may also be considered by individual households. Digital media nowadays is so universal, that it captures many personal family memories and stories: home videos, pictures, family portraits – over the course of time this content requires more and more storage capacity. Optical media storage is a reliable way of storing these memories: it does not consume electricity and it is more resistant to external threats.
Would you consider storing your personal archives on optical media? Could it be the next page data archiving history?
Falcon Technologies International LLC’s Research and Development team have created a solution that complies with the archival needs and requirements of the financial institutions and government entities. Our FalconMEDIA Century Archival CDs and DVDs with golden and platinum reflective layers showed outstanding results during the internal and third-party benchmarking tests: data stored on these professional archival discs stays accessible and integer for more than 500 years – timeframe that is enough to archive data for almost 7 future generations of the humanity.
