Calling all vendors – NAS solution required

[Neil Smith]

Excellent RFP, Scott … you’ve neatly summarized what’s going to become the standard requirements for modern post-houses.

Our LumaNAS 3.0 solution addresses precisely those requirements you’ve highlighted … a client/server architecture built around a very efficient ZFS file server NAS with a 10GbaseT network to the client workstations (Mac, PC or Linux).

With standard Cat6/7 cabling and 10GbaseT NICs we can deliver a sustained 800MB/s throughput which is plenty fast enough for HD, 2K and even 4K workflows … we can certainly add an 10Gbe SFP+ NIC (or even InfiniBand) for connectivity to your switch and Data Center, but if you haven’t checked out recent developments in 10GbaseT switches and Cat 6/7 cabling you might just want to see how far they’ve come and their amazing the price points.

The cool thing about our LumaNAS 3.0 approach is that we can easily integrate Mac (both Thunderbolt and the old PCIe towers) Windows and Linux clients through a simple NFS mount so you can have Adobe CC running across whatever platform delivers the best price/performance.

Even though you’re not running a 4K workflow at the moment our solution easily scales to handle 4K ProRes and even UHDTV DPX pipelines if you need it.

Open sourced ZFS is the the most advanced file system and volume manager available today … much more efficient and reliable than old fashioned block-based technologies like Xsan and StorNext and in terms of price/performance it’s unbeatable. Its built in data integrity and sophisticated replication and snapshot functionality means that you no longer need to install expensive FC NICs, FC switches and FC RAID controllers … just use 6G or 12 SAS HBAs and JBODs which can be both spinning disks and SSDs … the super smart caching algorithms inherent with ZFS means you can get the best of both worlds – HDDs for cheap large capacity and SSDs for high speed performance!

The other thing about the LumaNAS 3.0 platform is the easy integration with Object-based cloud storage … the M&E world is starting to find ways to incorporate cloud based elastic resources and storage and open sources platforms like OpenStack provide tremendous cost savings over proprietary based solutions like Quantum Lattus.

The future is open .. NAS based storage based around ZFS with efficient connectivity to OpenStack cloud storage is going to become an integral part of many post-production shared storage requirements.

Check out our website for more details on LumaNAS 3.0 … if you’re any where near West Hollywood, we’re actually giving a ‘collaborative workflow’ demonstration this afternoon at 5pm on The Lot …. we show 6K DRAGON and 4K ProRes dailies being processed on 4 clients simultaneously all connected over Cat 7 cabling to the back-end LumaNAS 3.0 file share with 96 TBs of HDD storage and 8 TBs of SSDs.

We can easily scale the solution to handle a petabyte of data if and when you need it – high density JBOD enclosures are really cheap now and 6TB drives are falling in price every week.

Let me know where you’re based and if you need any more information.

Cheers,
Neil

Neil Smith
CEO
LumaForge LLC
Advanced Digital Workflow
323-850-3550
http://www.lumaforge.com

[Scott Goddard]

Hi Neil,

Many thanks for the breakdown of your product. I certainly agree that NAS and file servers using the likes of ZFS are the way to go these days. Do you have resellers in central Europe?

Feel free to email me a cost proposal to my specification.

Thanks,

Scott Goddard

Neo Verite Limited
https://neoverite.com