[Jacob William]

Hi…..

There are a lot of opinions, but I shoot with both a high-end interchangeable lens still camera that shoots great video (the Panasonic GH3 (link is external)) and a high-end consumer camcorder that shoots decent stills (a 900 series Panasonic camcorder (link is external)), and I get great video and stills from both.

But when I carry one camera, I carry the GH3 (link is external) – because it offers the most flexibility – with its interchangeable lenses, more powerful built-in flash and easy-to-access external controls.

The GH3 (link is external) has much higher still image quality – and its video images are just as good, if not better than my camcorder’s.

[Jacob William]

A FibreJet managed enterprise-class storage network gives multiple computers operating on multiple operating systems concurrent access to multiple terabytes of storage using just about anyone’s storage over Fibre Channel or iSCSI. FibreJet has shown in real world application to have as much as 500% better performance during file-copy compared to the same operation on other SAN management software. On SAN networks using FibreJet operators are able find a file in as little as 5 seconds as compared to taking as much as 4 minutes and more for the same operation in many other well known SAN management solutions.

FibreJet is the proven choice for storage and server consolidation; higher performance, lower cost, easy scalability with higher availability when you need to work together. FibreJet is a true multi-platform sharing solution. Whether you are a MAC OSX user or a MS Windows 7 user, FibreJet lets you share files and volumes of virtually unlimited size over a Fibre Channel based network or over an Ethernet iSCSI network. Virtually unlimited systems on the SAN can read and write to our shared storage simultaneously. Using your favorite standard disk utilities, you can pool data across multiple SAN storage (both RAID and JBOD) for enhanced performance. Each SAN attached computer accesses the storage as if it were directly attached, giving extreme performance for demanding applications such as sharing HD video with a workgroup of editors, or cluster computing where high speed access to a shared data set allows each computer to calculate at maximum efficiency.

[Jacob William]

Once you’ve decided to create an LTO/LTFS archive, there are some things you need to consider in order to be successful with it. It’s not the same as copying files onto a hard disk and sticking it in a storage closet. The mechanics are different, so there are a few more steps, and there are rules associated with LTFS that require some forethought.

One thing to know is that LTO tapes are raw media that do not come formatted, so you have to format them before you can use them. You can format using terminal commands — a cumbersome process that few would undertake — or, when formatting for LTFS, you can do it using LTFS software. After that, any hardware that has LTFS software installed will be able to read the LTO tape. One of the defining characteristics of LTFS is that in the process of formatting, it partitions the tape so that one section stores the actual content and the other section stores an index of metadata. The index allows the tape to be self-describing, which improves archive management. It also helps ensure organizations are compliant with broadcast networks that require indexed tapes.

Another consideration is whether to format the drive in compressed mode, and the short answer is “no.” Operating in compressed mode is useful in the IT industry when backing up things like documents and text files. But in the media industry, where nearly all video files are already compressed into a format that saves space, there’s little to be gained by formatting a tape in compressed mode. In fact, it can slow down the writing and retrieval processes considerably.