Terrablock 24d vs ISIS 5000

[Josh Nikon]

I thought I would share some of the specs we are looking at..

TerraBlock 24D 48TB
8gb Fibre
FTI 26p10gsw Ethernet switch 24 port
finisar 8.5 Gb/s Transciever
Q-logic SANbox 8 port switch
Atto Celerity 81es fibre cards
Finisar 8.5 GB Transcievers

thats the bulk of the hardware with some other misc. needs I didn’t list.

while the ISIS was only 32 TB and purely Ethernet

What do you think?

[Bob Zelin]

Josh –
not meaning to be rude (ha ha – I am always trying to be rude) – but exactly what are you trying to determine in your comparison ? The Facilis is dramatically faster than AVID ISIS 5000 simply because they are using Fibre Channel. And you get more storage for the money, and better support for the money. The AVID ISIS 5000 in it’s basic setup is 1GbE only. You can add a single 10GbE Myricom card PER ISIS ENGINE (only one per chassis) to achieve speeds similar to Facilis. The AVID ISIS 5000 maxes out at 32 TB – this means that they are using an older style 3g chassis that can only support 2TB drives maximum (you cannot put 3TB drives into an ISIS 5000). And they way it is configured, they have 3 groups of 5 drives RAID 5 (one is a hot spare) so you only get 22TB of usable storage for your 32TB investment.

Does it work well with AVID if you are doing DNxHD145 – sure it does. The ISIS 5000 is teriffic for what it does, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to deal with than the old AVID Unity. But is it better than a Facilis Terrablock. Don’t be silly.

Bob Zelin

[Josh Nikon]

Bob, thanks.. I appreciate your knowledge! its things like you just said that are the bullets I need to “sell” an AVID house over to Facillis.. I’ve already got a couple blank stares.. from high ups.. but the people who want to use it and I deal with directly love the idea..

but the last thing I want on my head is a 70k mistake.. having people verify their experiences with both.. and which is superior, solidifies the technical into real world practices and experiences.. I can take that to them and show them what other users are saying and why they went away from avid.

Thanks again for your input.. its is all very helpful.

[Chris Hocking]

Sorry to dig up an old thread.

I’m curious – what solution did you end up going with Josh? Are you happy with the purchase?

This post always comes up when you search for “ISIS 5000” in Google, so I though it was worth noting one addition to Bob’s comments in case others are making a similar decision…

You can actually scale the ISIS 5000 from 16 to 96 TB (12 to 72 TB with RAID) or 32 TB to 192 TB (24 TB to 144 TB with RAID) and from 4 to 90 switched client connections with additional chassis and switches.

It’s also worth noting that Avid is currently offering some pretty amazing trade-in deals at the moment, so you can trade in your old LANSHARE dongle, and get a substantial amount off an ISIS purchase.

Bob has pretty much summed up all the big bullet points in regards to ISIS versus Terrablock – but to just play the devil’s advocate for the moment, I will say that a lot of the really big hire companies I’ve worked with that do big OB’s, temporary TV studio setups, etc. all prefer to use the ISIS, because it’s built like a brick, and is extremely reliable. You can also build a lot of redundancy into the system – so that if a chassis falls over, the end user doesn’t even notice. Because Avid only support a very limited range of switching and network hardware (Cisco and Force10) – it also means that once you build an ISIS system, it’s extremely easy to fault find as everything is very well documented.

That of course is not to say that the Terrablock isn’t used in these situations as well – because it certainly is – but I thought it was worth noting that on average, when I speak to technicians on the field, for mission critical jobs, they “trust” an ISIS setup over a Terrablock setup in most situations.

I think one of the reasons the ISIS is so popular, especially in the enterprise, big facilities and in television land is because people just trust the product. It may not be the fastest, and it certainly isn’t the cheapest, but Avid has spent many years improving and perfecting the technology to make it work perfectly with their editing software. Big businesses trust other big businesses.

That said… now days there are PLENTY of other products (such as the Terrablock) that are really giving the ISIS a run for it’s money. Almost every single editing storage solution offers the exact same “Unity-emulation” which wasn’t the case a few years ago. Editshare, Dynamic Drive Pool, FlavourSys Strawberry, xMCore… there are now a heap of systems out there. And now that products like Avid Sphere & Adobe Anywhere are starting the surface, this will probably change the game entirely once again…

My 2c.

[Paul Hayward]

We’ve been using a TerraBlock 24D in our production network here (Avid Media Composer on PCs w/ NitrisDX and soft-only on iMac) for almost 3 years. It was an upgrade from the Avid Unity after one of the boys met Jim McKenna at NAB and we impressed. It’s more than lived up to its name for us. Super fast, reliable and what “issues” we’ve had we more to do with the mix of hardware and network setup on our end. We were in hot before over ISIS or TerraBlock and this is one case where the devil we didn’t know was better than the one did. The tech support is probably the best selling feature. No where else will you get immediate, remote support from a team who wont’ stop until they figure it out. Was a wise buy for us

[Elvin Jasarevic]

Hi Josh,

If you are still in search for shared storage with Avid/FCP/Premiere project sharing and get guaranteed speed, why dont you check DDP? Its award winning shared storage and ethernet based SAN.

Give an email to Jason Starne and ask for demo in your facility..

regards
Elvin

https://www.ddpsan..asia