Terrablock vs DDP

[Chris Casey]

Duncan,

I’ve sent you an email directly.

Cheers,

Some IT Director that Bob thinks should be fired because IT people can’t understand video needs.

[Elvin Jasarevic]

Great stuff from Duncan.

I wish Ryan from SNS and Paul from Editshare also do a demo for you so you really can experience 1st class demos and decide for yourself.

elvin@ddp.jp
https://www.ddpsan.asia

[Maria Wardian]

I’m currently working in a medium sized commercial post-house (10-12 iMacs and MacPros using mostly Premiere, After Effects, and Maya). We often work with 4K or even 6K footage using Facilis Terrablock as our SAN server and I’m not sure I’m too impressed with Facilis – at least with our set up.

We have two Facilis chassis in our server room housing a total of about 54TB. These feed out from a 10Gb ethernet card into about 8 computers, as well as another slower 1Gb LAN connection to a few other computers used mostly as a render farm. We do not have fibre connection, but have been told we should still be able to work with 6K footage with high speed ethernet and decently juiced up iMacs/MacPros. Some stations also output a monitor signal using AJA T-Tap and ioXT box to client monitor.

We have had A LOT of issues using Facilis for the last two years. When problems arise with speed of performance or drives going down, their support has often been tough to get a hold of, they don’t call back even when issues are super time sensitive, they won’t explain other solutions or share known issues, and they’re extremely expensive to receive support from ($6,000 for one year of phone and hardware support). It’s been frustrating to be a customer and we’re hoping to find a better SAN set up that isn’t charging so much for proprietary drives and mediocre support.

Some recent issues we’ve had with them are:

1. Video freezing and lagging when editing in premiere, especially when going to monitor out with ProRes4444 footage. This has been a huge reoccurring issue that won’t go away.
2. In the past, drives would randomly unmount.
3. Creating new files and renaming files would take a minute or two to show up from one computer to the next.
4. Sometimes, I cannot export directly to Facilis partition from Premiere and must export to my desktop first.
5. Replacing a drive costs $400, and 6 of them have gone under in the last two years.
6. Every so often, files can’t be read directly off the Facilis that use native Mac programs (like Preview, Acrobat, Quicktime, Text Edit), so we have to copy them locally to open or open with a different program.

We’ve gone through so much troubleshooting and upgrades with them and brought in other networking professionals to make sure our wiring and systems are set up correctly with all the right permissions, but we still keep having performance issues.

The only other SAN solution I’ve worked with is SANmp/Evo which had plenty of issues of it’s own, but at least it didn’t cost nearly as much since they weren’t as proprietary. We are now looking for other recommendations for SAN server solution that can handle working with 4-6k commercial graphics and editing before we have to pay another $6,000 with Facilis just for support of a system that isn’t quite keeping up.

Maria W

[Chris Casey]

Thanks for chiming in with your experience Maria.

Cheers,
Chris

Some IT Director that Bob thinks should be fired because IT people can’t understand video needs.

[Troy Williams]

I realize I’m necro-posting here, but I appreciate that Maria brought up a good point regarding proprietary drives. I’ve been bit by that before. Is DDP the same way?

Within the next year I’m looking to set up a >100TB cluster and DDP is on my short-list, but a strong influence on my decision will be on whether I can easily replace a failed drive with an exact unit obtained from common vendors such as Amazon or Newegg.