Re: sad initial impressions of LairdShare

When I did research for our facility, I did literally scores of searches for shared storage solutions for video editing, and Facilis Terrablock never once came up in the searches. I probably used 25 different search terms and would go 8-10 pages deep within each search. These included using acronyms like SAN, shared storage for video editing and dozens more. I did research on and off for literally a month, usually spending several hours a week looking at web sites, reading brochures, calling companies, requesting demos, specs, price quotes etc.

During all that, I didn't even know they existed. I also did searches on this list and I only recall one hit that listed their product...and it was when we were deep into the evaluation process.

By that time we had ruled out SAN solutions for a variety of reasons, notably, we'd need to add new fibre channel HBA's to 5 workstations as well as new cabling, but the biggest one being the way SAN systems work. We wanted true file sharing from a common media pool and there were only a handful of products that met that criteria without requiring constant logging on/off of volumes and assigning read/write priveleges.

In my opinion, Facilis needs to do a better job optimizing their web site search terms...as well as marketing their product. We might have considered them, but we ended up spending under $15,000 for a solution that works great for our needs, including all cabling, a new switch, and installation and configuration. So I doubt they could've come close to that price considering we would've had to add fibre channel HBA's and cabling..and that's only if we had direct connected to the unit and foregone a fibre channel switch, which adds several thousand more to the cost.




Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com