Front Porch Digital Receives Broad Support for Archive eXchange Format

Front Porch Digital, a leader in cloud-based content storage management (CSM) solutions, announced that its Archive eXchange Format (AXF) open-archiving technology is seeing broad adoption among archivists and media organizations around the world. Installations at esteemed organizations such as Laboratoire Éclair, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NIBG), Danish Film Institute, Swedish Film Institute, and others, along with support from Spectra Logic and integration with Sony’s Optical Disc Archive technology, position AXF to replace outmoded legacy formats such as TAR with a truly open and storage-agnostic approach, ensuring long-term accessibility to the world’s most valuable content.

“Our aim in developing AXF was to support interoperability among disparate digital-content storage systems and ensure the content’s long-term availability no matter how technology evolves,” said Brian Campanotti, chief technology officer of Front Porch Digital. “The fact that these organizations and others have embraced AXF puts it well on the way to achieving critical mass and becoming the industry standard for long-term preservation and storage of media assets. In fact, the AXF standardization effort is nearing completion within SMPTE and we expect ratification this year.”

AXF is integrated into DIVArchive V7.0, the latest generation of Front Porch Digital’s CSM system. To ensure wider accessibility, Front Porch Digital has also released stand-alone tools such as AXF Explorer that allow access to AXF packages and media without the need for DIVArchive. France’s movie and television production house Laboratoire Éclair linked its DIVArchive V7.0 installation with its full production and postproduction environment to streamline workflow, while its customers have access to long-term storage services managed with the system. In addition, the Danish Film Institute and Swedish Film Institute have built their digitization, archiving, and preservation workflows around DIVArchive V7.0 to protect their national film heritage.

Beyond installations, in September 2012 Spectra Logic became the first vendor verified to support AXF across its entire range of tape libraries and tape drives. Also, Front Porch Digital and Sony have collaborated to ensure AXF is compatible with Sony’s Optical Disc Archive expandable robotic library. Customers who use DIVArchive V7.0 with Spectra Logic products or the Sony system will get the benefit of long-term storage and preservation through AXF.

AXF is built from the ground up to be fully storage-agnostic, meaning that an AXF object is the same whether it is stored on spinning disk, flash memory, data tape media, or in Front Porch Digital’s LYNX^SM cloud service. In this way, users avoid the complexity associated with file systems, storage technologies, or operating systems.