This chapter, portions of which were first published in November 1997, will explore integrating the digital library into the broadcast facility using servers as the medium and automation as the mechanism.

Determining the amount of storage necessary for a digital library integrated with both servers and tape transports is a difficult task. The first question usually asked by video server manufacturers and their sales associates is "How much storage do you need?" In reality, if you've never put a server into a facility, there's really no way to know what is the correct amount of storage.

Disks, controllers, and associated storage array subsystems can be the single highest-cost elements in implementing a video server. If you have only a single-ended video server engine ^[1] that is one in and one out then storage becomes the only other principle element in the video server itself.

The physical amount of on-line available storage required for a particular operation can easily be...