HAL Ingest/Tomb

This page gives a general overview of HAL and the Tomb.

HAL Ingest is a machine in the hallway on the 3rd floor (across from Edit 3). It is used by the videographers to offload/ingest raw footage after a shoot.

The Tomb is a storage system used to hold content that was previously on HAL Ingest - the Tomb is expandable storage while HAL is not. The storage devices for the Tomb are connected to the Xcode02 server in the server racks in the 3030 area of the 3rd floor.

Prior to the inception of the Tomb, when HAL was running low on space, content would simply be deleted, or, in one instance, the storage system directly connected to the HAL system had larger hard drives installed.

Neither of these approaches were ideal.

Simply deleting content from HAL meant that the deleted content, if needed in the future, would need to be restored from LTO. This is a manual process that takes time, and having content exist only on LTO violates the 3-2-1 backup rule that we try to adhere to for content like raw footage and edited master files.

Installing larger hard drives in the HAL storage system was not sustainable. The rate at which we add content can outpace the increase in available hard drive size. And each time you want to install larger drives, it means copying all the content off to the new array that holds the larger drives, which is a time consuming process.

The Tomb offers a good compromise as we can easily continue adding to the system’s storage, and we can utilize any existing/available hard drives (re-purposing drives that are no longer in use elsewhere, etc.). And when we do purchase drives, we can buy the size of drive that offers the best $/TB cost, we do not necessarily need to purchase the largest hard drives available.