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CLOUD COMPUTING
NatGeo Moves
Media Archive to
Public Cloud
PHOTO: ISTOCK
E-BOOKS
Encyclopaedia Britannica Now Online Only
AFTER 244 YEARS, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will cease to publish its flagship line of reference books and will concentrate instead on its
digital offerings.
“We’d like to think our tradition is not to
print, but to bring scholarly knowledge to
the people,” said Jorge Cauz, the company’s
president.
Britannica has printed the encyclopedia
since 1768. The 2010 edition, which was published as a 32-volume set, was the last one in
print; there are still 4,000 sets of that edition
for sale. Some 2 million sets have been printed
through the entire run of the encyclopedia.
Over the past few years, the print edition has
accounted for less than 1% of the company’s
revenue. “The market is not there,” Cauz said.
The online edition costs a lot less, with a
basic subscription running at $17 per year or
$1.99 per month, compared to $1,395 for the
32-volume print version. The company has
been offering online editions of its encyclo-
pedia for 20 years, with more than 65% of its
online sales coming from educational institu-
tions; the online edition is updated constantly.
The National Geographic Society
announced that it will now back up
and archive its large unstructured
multimedia files on Nirvanix’s Cloud
Storage Network. Physical storage
upgrades, along with the data migration process, have become too
expensive and unwieldy, the organization said; it expects to save money
in the six-figure range by not having
to invest in any further upgrades.
The 124-year-old society said its
archive is on the order of 100TB today but will reach the petabyte level
in the near future.
An advantage of using a cloud
service is that it will improve Na-
tional Geographic’s ability to collab-
orate with video editors around the
globe. “There’s no question that it’s
the kind of thing we’d look to lever-
age in the future,” said Dan Backer,
director of infrastructure systems.
“You want to hire the best possible
video producer you can find. If
that video producer is in New York
City and the data is in Washington,
D. C., there’s going to be a transfer
problem.”
Backer said benchmark tests
showed upload performance in
the cloud is about the same as it is
on-site.
Another benefit,
Backer said, will
come from new
opportunities to sell the society’s
cloud-based information by making different “buckets” of content
available online.
— LuCAS MeArIAN
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