I watched the interview that of Su-Syan Huang from Accusys at NAB. I am quite impressed with what they are providing.
Currently I am working with a small creative group that is looking to get a shared storage for an upcoming project. It is a team of 4 editors where 2, possibly 3 editors working from the shared resource at the same time. Problem is, they have a limited budget for about $3K for their (shared) storage.
When I was approached and asked if I could help with a solution for a team of 4, the first thing that came to mind was ProMAX Studio, this was before I knew the budget.
The team initially was thinking of getting a Pegasus R6 or something similar and connecting 2 workstations to it. My response: BAD IDEA! BAD! DO NOT DO THAT!
I am stuck at this point, as the only thing in their budget I can come up with is a NAS from QNAP, but I really do not like that because that kind of appliance is not meant for NLE editing.
The A16T2-Share from Accusys would be perfect, but not available until after early July, Huang mentioned they are planning to ship then, and resellers will offer barebones units. the A16T2-Share with 16TB over 4 bays and a Mac mini as the meta-data controller and XSAN would work for this team of 4 people.
I typically do not like DIY kits. I have been administering a 250TB Active Storage mVault/ mRAID for the prior 1.5 years. As an admin, you know that support is vital. And I can say when Active Storage went dark in 2013, it was scary when one of the metadata controllers died. I had no warranty support for that while, with only 1 working controller, eventually was forced to replace both with 2 Quantum MDC’s.
Huang mentioned that Accusys was part of the same team that designed the Xserve, I can see a resemblance of the Accusys hardware design and Active Storage. I am going to keep Accusys on my radar.
If anyone can point me to a solution around $3K, I would appreciate it.
I do not think TB is going away anytime soon from Apple products. It essentially is replacing PCI-e, Intel’s Alpine Ridge controller will support PCIe 3.0 and other protocols, including HDMI 2.0 (allowing for 4K resolutions at 60 Hz), and DisplayPort 1.3 (allowing for 5K resolutions at 60 Hz). We won’t see hardware with this type of connection until Q3 of this year, cough, cough, new Mac Pro 2, cough.