Facilis Terrablock 24D

An Affordable, Cross-Platform and Reliable SANAND RELIABLE SAN

By Terence Curren

February 1, 2006    Source: Studio Monthly

Our company AlphaDogs, a post-production studio in Burbank, CA, had been looking for a shared-storage solution for more than three years. What we needed was hard to come by economically—a cross-platform system, with real-time protection, that was easy to install and maintain, at a reasonable price point. Then we discovered Terrablock from Facilis Technology, Inc.

Soon after we bought a Terrablock 24D system, which can accommodate up to 20 users and up to two streams of uncompressed 10-bit HD, we landed a contract to online and color-correct 60 half-hour episodes of a new Learning Channel show. The post schedule was going to include four shows per week. We knew we would need to use one of our lower-cost rooms, in this case, an Avid Adrenaline room, to capture the uncompressed media. We would then use one of our Avid Symphony rooms for the finishing work.

Prior to this, we’d been using a fibre patch bay to move drive arrays between rooms. By analyzing the amount of time it took to shut our systems down, move patches and restart the systems again, we came up with a dollar amount in lost operator and room time. A simple spreadsheet showed us that covering the cost of the Terrablock, with its improved efficiency, would be a slam-dunk.

Streams and Workflows

The scaleable Terrablock line starts with the 8XS system, which can handle up to eight users, 3.2 TB of storage and handles video streams up to compressed HD. The 12D can also handle up to eight users, 4.8 TB and up to one stream of uncompressed 10-bit HD. The 24D system we bought fit our in-house storage needs and studio size perfectly.

Terrablock is a volume-level system, which means only one user can have write access to a volume at any given time. All other users can have read access if they have permission. This isn’t perfect for all workflows. If you need multiple users to be able to write to a drive, you’ll need a file-level system like Avid’s Unity or Apple Xsan. This wasn’t a problem for our workflow; volume-level control is ideal for us. Plus, the Terrablock works at a fraction of the cost of Avid Unity and without the networking complexity that comes with configuring Apple Xsan.

Since we were already wired for fibre, the install was a snap. If you don’t have that infrastructure, that will be your first step. Hire a pro to do your wiring, as fibre cable and connectors can be finicky. The good news for AlphaDogs is that Terrablock can use 4 Gb fibre, which lets us capture and edit uncompressed 10-bit, 4:4:4 HD on our Apple Final Cut Pro HD stations.

You’ll likely connect a few computers to the Terrablock server, as we did at AlphaDogs, and use the Terrablock Manager program to create users for each station. The program (see illustrations, top left) is very simple to use. One warning: If you format mounted volumes, which appear as raw local drives on your computer, for the Mac, you’ll need MacDrive to use it on your PCs. If you format NTFS, you can read it on recent versions of OS X but not write to it. We developed workarounds to get data back and forth between our Mac-based graphics rooms, Mac-based ProTools rooms and PC-based Avid edit systems.