Facilis Terrablock San System Feedback good?

[Mark Maness]

Excellent system!

But keep in mind that its not a true shared storage system, yet. But soon, they will release an update to make it that way… for a fee, of course.

If you’re not worried about that, its gold! We have been using it for more than a year with very very few glitches and only a couple of times did we need to restart it because of a system crash. That’s awesome stats in the SAN world. Just ask anyone who has an EditShare or X-RAID.

Facilis’ tech support is out of this world. Immediate response when and if you ever need them.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Peter Wiggins]

Take a look at this before going Terrablock

https://www.lairdtelemedia.com/

Everybody was talking about it at NAB

Peter

[Mark Maness]

Very neat idea… But beware, its an untested system and it doesn’t do Uncompressed video.

Look at your needs very carefully before jumping on something.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com
https://blogs.creativecow.net/waynecarey

[Sean Oneil]

[Peter Wiggins] “Take a look at this before going Terrablock

https://www.lairdtelemedia.com/ “

Just curious, why was everyone talking about that thing? 12TB ethernet sharing for $20k. It looks like a total rip-off to me. Am I missing something? The website doesn’t have shred of detail. Doesn’t say if it’s a NAS or a SAN. Doesn’t say anything.

Sean

[Robert Reed — needs email update]

[Peter Wiggins] “Everybody was talking about it at NAB”

I spent quite a deal of time at the show and talked with many of my friends and booth personnel about many of the things there this year. I didn’t hear a word about this.

So either “everybody” doesn’t include all the people I know, or somebody is exaggerating.

Like Sean, I find it overpriced for something that is not clear as to what it does or doesn’t do. Reading the website, I feel as if the thing was designed by a car salesman.

Robert

[Donato M. rondinelli]

I agree with Wayne. It’s not “true” shared storage. For what we need it’s perfect. Our 24D is 2 1/2 years old. Super easy to maintain. Plug & Play! Tech support is AWESOME. We had a few issues with drives & the guys walked us through them. Nno complaints.
-dMR

[Sean Oneil]

What do you guys mean by “it’s not true shared storage?” Do you just mean that it’s one of those systems that only allows write-access to one person at a time, but everyone has read access?

Sean

[Donato M. rondinelli]

Sean,
Yes. Only 1 person has write access and the same project cannot be shared at the same time. If you need to collaborate on a program, have everyone work on their own segments, in their own projects and join them together at the end. You could run into a problem if your graphics, audio, or other editors need to work on the same project at the same time.

Where I work, all 3 editors do their own thing. Sometime we swap rooms, Sometimes another editor sweetens, sometimes we work on the same project, but we always wait till the other is finished with the project & turns it over.

System is fast, reliable, and recovers well. We’ve had 3 drive failures in almost 3 years and media was never lost. We have it a hush box & it gets warm in there. That could be the cause of the failures. R&D is good. When I got the system it only had Raid 1, now it has Raid 5. The latest upgrade allows updating of everyone’s read drive w/o unmounting. I hear they’re working on file level storage…That’s gonna rock.

HTH,

-dMR

[Mark Raudonis]

Robert,

Stow the cynicism, please. Do you really mean to say that just ’cause you didn’t see it or hear about it from your “friends” it can’t be any good? Close minded, are we?

It just so happens that Videography magazine gave “Lairdshare” one of it’s “Best of Show” awards. When I was at NAB I happened to wander by the Laird booth and ended up having a long conversation with Dan Summer, one of the brains behind the product. Dan told me that his background is in much larger scale SANs for the likes of various government agencies, but that this is his first effort at transferring that technology and expertise to the “under 12 seat” post house SAN. What’s so unique about this product? The bandwidth that he’s able to push through plain old gig E is extraordinary. If you can avoid fibre, you can save a ton of money on HBA’s, fibre switches, cable drops, etc. The Lairdshare is a step in that direction.

I’ve got no reason to tout this product other than I can see that the design and concept of this product is very forward thinking. I’ve already got a huge X-SAN, and the Lairdshare as currently configured isn’t for me. But, if you’re looking for a small, efficient, easy to use “SAN in a CAN”, you should take a look at Lairdshare.

Mark

[Sean Oneil]

[Mark Raudonis] “The bandwidth that he’s able to push through plain old gig E is extraordinary”

Now you sound like a car salesman. You do realize that no matter how good it is, it’s physically impossible for it to be greater than 1gb?

This could be a solid product. But it doesn’t matter how good it is. It’s $20k for ethernet. That is a RIP-OFF. Studio Network Solutions have been doing the same exact thing for a long time BTW. I don’t mean to knock either company. But it just doesn’t make any sense considering you can go Fibre for $20k.

I hate mentioning this in the Terrablock thread. But I’m going to. If I had to get a SAN tomorrow, I would do this:

1) Buy an Areca 4gb Fibre-to-SATA external RAID-5 controller. They’re like $2k. They turn up to sixteen SATA disks into FC hardware raid.

2) Connect it to just about any eSATA array you want (like all the ones advertised here). Or put your own together.

3) Buy a used Qlogic SANbox switch on ebay.

4) Buy FC cards for all the Macs. PCI-X G5’s can use the old Qlogic cards, which are going for like $150 on ebay.

5) Buy licenses for MetaSAN or Xsan.

That’s all you need. It’s essentially the same as the Xserve RAID setup – except it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and a lot more scalable.

Sean