HUDSON, MA (September 12, 2017) – “Winning a number of repeat orders for Facilis TerraBlock highlights the enduring popularity of this elegant and yet highly cost effective shared storage system,” said Dan Muchmore, Sales Director of Tyrell CCT. Muchmore was commenting on news of two significant new orders for Facilis storage solutions for collaborative media production networks from London-based facilities, Atlantic Productions and Reef Television.
Both companies have placed orders for expansions of their existing Facilis shared storage systems. The systems have been specified, delivered and commissioned by Tyrell CCT, Facilis’ local channel partner in the UK.
At Reef Television, their new Facilis storage system is replacing a DDP storage system which the company inherited through a company merger. The expanded Facilis shared storage system will enable Reef to support a number of additional clients, running on their network and to accommodate their media storage requirements.
“We needed to grow our storage capacity using technology that is fit for purpose and also represents a cost-effective solution to our business,” commented Michael Sunderland, Head of Facilities at Atlantic Productions. “We performed due diligence on all the different vendor solutions and Facilis was the stand out option. As an existing user, we’re confident of the system’s reliability and capabilities and when compared with alternative solutions it represents a good capital investment.”
At Atlantic Productions, the TerraBlock Expansion Unit enables the company to bring further projects in house and still keep existing projects in ‘edit live’ on the storage server. The benefit of the Expansion Unit is that the users does not require another server if the driving requirement is extra storage capacity.
“Facilis and Tyrell understand our business,” states Dominik James, Head of Post Production at Reef Television. “They understand the technical requirements needed to support our staff that is increasingly working in high data rate workflows. And they understand the commercial realities of business today, where we need to be able to justify every pound of our investment budget.”
Facilis TerraBlock: cost effective technical excellence
Being showcased for the first time in Europe at IBC 2017, Version 7.0 of Facilis’ TerraBlock represents a quantum progression in the evolution of the company’s popular shared storage system with over 3,000 units installed and tens of thousands of seats in facilities worldwide. Since its inception in 2003, Facilis has stayed true to its mission of developing of cost-effective, high performance shared storage solutions for collaborative media production networks, and version 7.0 is a prime example of that.
With the new Web Console, Facilis enhances ease of use, improves IT integration, and positively change the expectations of system administrators. The Web Console is delivering features that customers didn’t think were possible, and doing it without increasing complexity.
End-users will see a modernized browser-based and mobile-compatible interface, which in addition to being more pleasing and responsive, allows greater levels of control and flexibility. More granular permissions management allows users to login with multiple password-protected accounts on the same client workstation, allowing access to increasing number of resources for a given project. If one data path is compromised, the client systems will failover to a second or third path, maintaining connectivity and keeping the job on track.
A first for a system of this type, the Web Console provides the capability for any user on Ethernet or Fiber Channel connected workstations to mount Facilis volumes as either network devices or local drives. Since volume appearance changes the OS and application behavior, this feature is especially useful for users wishing to increase the responsiveness of their applications. This feature further differentiates the Facilis Shared File System from standard network file systems, and Facilis from standard network storage providers.
Administrators enjoy dynamic bandwidth monitoring of users and storage volumes, and server performance reporting in a unified system dashboard. Volume creation, size change and deletion, as well as all permission actions can be completed from any browser-enabled device, including mobile devices. The administrator has the power to add (push) and remove (pull) volumes from the desktop of any connected client, for total facility control. Enhanced LDAP and Active Directory integration includes a real-time user lookup, avoiding the need to keep user databases synchronized.
With the new Hub Server, Facilis is focusing on those broadcasters and facilities that are seeking to grow their content delivery on a limited CapEx budget. By repurposing existing systems into back-end storage units, the Hub server offloads the processor-intensive workload of these older units. The resulting performance is up to double that of the previous environment. Through unification of connectivity, load-balancing of projects and users, and aggregation of multi-server resources, the Hub server makes good on Facilis’ promise to support their customers through the lifespan of their investment.
Open Storage Attachment
Facilis Shared File System is the most well-optimized file system for video and audio content creation, and now this power can be applied to 3rd-party storage arrays. Many facilities have various storage systems being used as direct-attached or network server-attached. This storage can live a new life with the availability of Facilis Open Storage Attachment (OSA). Licensed by capacity, most SAS and Fiber Channel attached storage is qualified for use with TerraBlock and Hub servers. This provides our customers the best sharing and connectivity, with larger capacity than they may have been able to afford in a turn-key system.
External arrays are secured with permissions through the shared file system, and are multi-user writable over Fiber Channel and Ethernet connected clients. Facilis remains the only product to provide a shared file system over Ethernet and Fiber channel without per-seat licensing or seat-count limitations.
