Facilis at CCW 2015: Delivering the Infrastructure that Drives New York Post Production

Facilis, a leading international supplier of cost-effective, high performance shared storage systems and dynamic workflow solutions for the film, broadcast and AV markets, is showcasing several of its latest products at CCW 2015 on stand 1042. These include solutions for high-end and budget conscious facilities, along with a new tracking product that combines search, management and access to project assets in a simple interface.

Visitors to the Facilis booth will be able to see the newly shipping TerraBlock software Version 6.5 that includes new scalability features for volumes and workgroups. New features include Cascading Volumes to enable seamless expansion of storage capacity among multiple drive groups and servers, all without moving or copying data. Windows Growing File Support to help customers incorporate capture and encode automations, along with popular edit-during-ingest workflows on Windows as well as OSX and Increased User Count with up to 250 connected multi-platform users with no per-seat fees through the Facilis Shared File System.

“New York was our first and still one of our largest markets,” said James McKenna, VP of Marketing and Pre Sales at Facilis Technology. “Our location, our knowledge of the post environment here, and our feature set that’s custom built for boutique post has helped us improve workflow for several hundred facilities across the NY area.”

Coming soon: The Facilis FastTracker is a new application designed for cataloging, searching and viewing many media types within a Facilis TerraBlock Shared Storage System, including all major QuickTime, MP4 and MXF codecs, along with DPX and TARGA image sequences, to name a few. This easy-to-use system includes custom metadata tagging, catalog user permissions, “Boolean” search capability and incremental indexing functionality. With no browser-based dependencies, this application is the fastest way to find clips, view them, and pull them into your project.

Also on display, The TerraBlock 24D /HA Hybrid Array includes a drive group of 8 SSDs for ultra-high performance, alongside a larger drive group of traditional 4TB SATA drives for up to 80TB combined capacity. Since TerraBlock is a virtual volume system, facility administrators can create unique volume configurations that make the best use of the capacity and scalability of HDDs, and the consistency of speed and bandwidth inherent in SSDs. Performance derived from the SSD group can power multi-stream uncompressed 4K workloads, while the 16 drive group delivers the collaborative experience for compressed HD editorial and content creation workflows.

The TerraBlock 8D is an 8-drive, 16TB turnkey content creation system. Like Facilis’ larger servers, this 2U rack mountable server combines the Facilis Shared File System with virtual volume workflow and performance for under $10K USD. The 8D includes Gigabit Ethernet connectivity and can be upgraded to support Fibre Channel and 10GigE connections, making it very attractive for facilities looking for a cost effective way to utilize existing Fibre Channel networking.

Product Availability

The TerraBlock 24D/HA, TerraBlock 8D, and TerraBlock software Version 6.5 is currently shipping. Facilis FastTracker software is currently in beta and expected in Q4 2015.