American storage giant Western Digital will provide its HGST Active Archive system to the Swiss École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), enabling the university to archive 17,000 hours of historical video and sound recordings from the Montreux Jazz Festival. 

The footage of the world’s second largest Jazz festival dates as far back as 1967, when the event was first held.

Newspaper cut out announcing the first Montreux Jazz Festival, 1967
Newspaper cut-out announcing the first Montreux Jazz Festival, 1967 – Montreux Jazz Festival

Oh Montreux

According to WDC, “the archive is the most comprehensive collection of live music footage ever created and contains classic performances from Marvin Gaye, Ella Fitzgerald, B.B. King, Johnny Cash, Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, and more, all of whom have performed at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In recognition of its 50 years of music and video archiving, the collection was inducted into the UNESCO Memory of the World program in 2013.”

The archive will be linked to an interactive platform, enabling Jazz enthusiasts to view and listen to the content. It will be stored in three separate systems, allowing for uninterrupted access in case of any potential outages.

Valluable recordings will be protected with erasure coding, a method of data protection that involves breaking up the data sets, encoding them with redundant data pieces and storing them across multiple locations.

HGST’s storage system currently holds three petabytes of data, and the company is expecting a 30 percent increase in capacity within the next five years. The Active Archive system is fully integrated, with storage drives, networking and compute in a single 42U rack, equipped with helium-filled HDDs and supporting the company’s own cloud management service, ActiveScale CM.