GBLabs Space

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Sure, it’s one of the best out there, and isn’t so new – several years in the US, at least. Requires few if any tweaks on the client’s end (to NIC or OS configuration) – it “just works”.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[John Heagy]

Alex,

Can you describe the environment as far as number of clients, concurrent ingest or playout streams, file formats involved, and connectivity?

Thanks
John

[Alex Gerulaitis]

John,

Was fortunate to see a demo and talk to GB Labs execs a couple years back, and heard of quite a few successful installations.

Case studies are here, and I’ll be happy to put you in touch with their US rep.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[David Gagne]

How does this compare with others, like, say, Small-Tree?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

I hope good folks from Small Tree will chime in if I badly put a foot in my mouth… The only turnkey shared storage solution I see on their site is GraniteSTOR Titanium4 and supports sharing out of the box with four GbE ports. Very cool product. All the other products under “storage” seem to be DAS (direct-attached storage) boxes that aren’t shared storage out of the box – they still need that NAS component to make it so.

I believe Small Tree’s specialty that made them famous (and hopefully rich) is networking equipment – switches, cards, I/O modules and their drivers – optimized for high bandwidth low latency applications like collaborative video editing.

GB Labs products on the other hand are all shared storage solutions – video-optimized NAS servers. They do nothing else.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[David Gagne]

https://www.small-tree.com/TitaniumZ_16_p/tz-16.htm

Up to 64TB, 2x 10Gb ports standard, up to 18x 10Gb ports available. 32GB memory.

I’d say it’s a direct competitor of yours?

[Alex Gerulaitis]

The product may be a direct competitor of one of the products of GB Labs (certainly not mine).

Companies become competitors usually when they compete largely for the same market share with similar products. Not the case here, at least not in a significant way.

May I ask why are you so intent on pitching Small Tree against GB Labs?

[David Gagne]

Comparing products is generally how consumers make decisions. iPhone Vs Android, etc.

Small-Tree is often featured here at Creative Cow and is one of the NAS providers who seems very committed to media workflows and working out the challenges specific to video. I don’t own any of their products yet, but I’ve talked to their engineers who are very knowledgeable when it comes to video production integration.

Of course we could also compare to other media SAN/NAS providers such as Facilis, NexSAN, SNS, Rorke, ProMax, Isilon etc., but the features seem closest with Small-Tree’s Titanium 16 as a turnkey NAS solution.

So, let me compare basic features:

Nearly identical! That’s good though, because consumers like me like to have options (and blue IS my favorite color, haha).

Sad that I couldn’t get out to NAB this year to come check it out first hand.

Let me echo the OP, John Heagy, who asked “Has anybody seen a Space system in action?” I’m sure someone here at the Cow has it installed…

[John Heagy]

I spoke to the CTOs of both companies.

At the chassis level they are similar, but GBLabs chassises can be connected to deliver capacity, throughput, and redundancy in ways that Small Tree’s cannot.

GBLabs runs a Linux kernel and the file system is xfs, Small Tree is zfs.

John

[David Gagne]

Interesting. I’d love to hear more detail on how that expansion works.