Imagine Products and StorageDNA Make European Debut of myLTOdna and HyperTape at IBC2018

Imagine Products, creator of software utilities for backing up, viewing, sharing, transcoding, and archiving video assets, and StorageDNA, a leader in intelligent nearline and archiving workflow solutions for media professionals, make the European debut of their joint long-term storage solution, myLTOdna, at IBC2018. Both thought leaders, the two companies have collaborated on an integrated solution that enables random access to files on an LTO tape, essentially turning it into a hard drive with HyperTape – an LTFS adaptation that was never available before. The results are time savings and easier access to assets in production and postproduction workflows.

The new solution is an integration between Imagine Products’ myLTO tape-authoring application and StorageDNA’s HyperTape high-performance, direct-access tape solution. The result is a simple and intuitive user interface with which to administrate HyperTape operating modes manually or automatically from creative applications such as Imagine Products’ PrimeTranscoder – a process that is highly preferable to command-line operations.

“This solution is a first for the industry,” said Doug Hynes, senior director, business development for StorageDNA. “No other company can provide direct access from an LTO tape with an easy-to-use interface. By joining forces with Imagine Products and integrating our capabilities, we are providing media professionals with the simplest and fastest LTO workflows available today.”

myLTOdna is the Mac-based, front-end interface for HyperTape. It allows users to switch modes of operation and direct HyperTape to train, write, and read to and from an LTO tape. With myLTOdna, users can now access files directly on tape without having to restore them for sequential operations such as transcoding, ingest, or QC. Instead, they can drag and drop files to or from tape at the desktop level at speeds exceeding 300 megabytes per second. Those benefits can save facilities hundreds of hours in time and resources.

“Together with StorageDNA, we’ve created a cutting-edge solution unlike any other – a way to access files from an LTO tape like you would a hard drive,” said Michelle Maddox, marketing director at Imagine Products. “This kind of LTO solution has never been available before, and we look forward to sharing it with a European audience at IBC.”

myLTOdna benefits any segment of the media and entertainment industry in which ever-increasing amounts of content regularly exceed spinning-disk storage capacities. It is especially useful for field/camera file offloads, postproduction facilities receiving field/camera files, facilities wanting to manage their online storage capacity levels, and those looking to keep files long term for repurposing.

Those who use myLTOdna with PrimeTranscoder can still archive to LTO tape with standard LTFS (myLTO) and use all the functions of PrimeTranscoder: transcoding files to useable formats, stitching together clips, burning in timecode, performing color correction, and adding watermarks.

myLTOdna and PrimeTranscoder are available from the Imagine Products and StorageDNA websites, while LTO drive licenses for HyperTape powered by dnaLTFS are available through StorageDNA’s reseller channel. Imagine Products offers a bundle for USD 7749, which provides users with all three software licenses: myLTOdna, HyperTape, and PrimeTranscoder, as well as a MagStor LTO-8 tape drive with a hard disk hot-swap slot.-BCS Bureau