In advance of NAB 2016, Dennis Kutchera of Creative Cow did some research into the wild world of shared storage for video post-production on a budget. After thoroughly vetting all of the options, he found that Tiger Technology provided not only the best value, but the best quality and customer service as well.
The world of shared storage can be very confusing, and as Dennis Kutchera reports in his Creative Cow article, if you are planning to attend NAB this year to shed some light on which shared storage solution will best suit your needs, you might end up taking one step forward and two steps back. Do you need a SAN or NAS? There are many pros and cons to both, and while one vendor may tout a feature as an asset, their competitor in the booth next to them may describe the same aspect as a liability. Dennis breaks it down for us in terms we can understand, from the vantage point of a company that needs a fast and reliable shared storage solution but also needs to stay within a budget.
In his article, Dennis gives us a brief but detailed summary of several shared storage offerings available today. These are Avid Isis, Dynamic Drive Pool (DDP), Editshare, Facilis Terrablock, OWC Jupiter Callisto, Promax Platform, and Tiger Technology Tigerbox.
So Advanced, It’s Simple
Dennis makes a few points about why he chose Tiger for his video post production workflow. Their slogan is “So Advanced, It’s Simple” and he found this to be true in practice. He decided to use Tiger Project Store Pro and found it to be very full-featured but also incredibly simple to use. Some of the features he liked were template creation, user/team management, proxy generation and metadata services.
In addition, he liked that Tiger supported Avid’s bin locking method of project sharing for Media Composer while also including workflow tools for Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro projects and media. Also, because Tiger is a true SAN system, it will cooperate with both Windows and Mac.
Dennis was in love with the fact Tiger Store does not force you to commit to a specific size for each managed or unmanaged volume. Here’s what he had to say about it in his article on Creative Cow:
“What I really love about Tiger Store is that I don’t have to commit to a specific size for each managed workspace virtual volume or the unmanaged SAN volumes. All virtual disks see the entire available storage and just dynamically shrink and grow as needed. You can set virtual volume workspace size limits if you want to, but we prefer to not add this restriction. This was a huge advantage for us over some of the other systems we looked at, where you must specify the number of terabytes required for each workspace volume.”
Introduction to the Tiger Series from Tiger Technology on Vimeo.
Navigating The Streams
In his article, Dennis states:
“Every vendor at NAB will confuse you with why NAS is better while another will push SAN or why dual 1 Gbe is fast enough for UHD while another says you need fibre. At the end of the day, it’s not the tech under the hood that counts, it’s whether or not you can reach your destination. So here is what you want to know: How many streams of whatever resolution you are using can the storage deliver continuously? I don’t care about the theoretical lab tests. I want stream counts. If they don’t have them in the specs, insist they give it to you.”
Get The Software Without The Hardware To Stay Within Budget
One final thought that Dennis points out in his article is that due to budget constraints, he simply could not afford both the Tiger Store SAN software and the branded hardware. That is when their reseller suggested they just purchase the Tiger Store SAN software with customer support, and use it to manage storage attached to a standard Windows server and third-party drive bay, populated with off-the-shelf SAS drives. He states that he had brilliant results.
Z Systems Is Your Source for Tiger Technology SAN Solutions
We have installed many SAN systems using Tiger Technology products in all sorts of configurations. Let us find the perfect solution for your workflow. Remember, at Z Systems, we know pro video – it’s all we do.
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To learn more about Tiger Technology and other shared storage solutions, call us at 952-974-3140 or email us today!
