Software Based Media Sharing for Avid

This is a small "poll" to see what the interest there is for a software based solution to share media between Avids and Final Cut. I run an offline editing company with about 20 editing stations, and we have been working on our own solution to share media between our editors, basically what we have done is to develop our own alternative to a LAN-Share or Editshare.

Our solutions looks like this: We run everything over a Gigabit network with Procurve switches. We use an older G5 as a server. The G5 has an ESATA-card where we connect Raided (Raid5) disks on Sonnet-chassis with 5 disks each (we use 5 1TB disks). With this solution we can connect up to 4 chassis, or totally 20 Terabyte of storage. When we need more, we can put in another ESATA-card that will allow us to connect 8 chassis, or 40 Terabyte of storage.

This solution allows us to expand our storage needs for a few hundred dollars per Terabyte, compared to a few thousand dollars per terabyte if we would have a LAN-Share or an Editshare...

The main difference is of course that the sorage hardware and the server is totally independent of each other, wich is not the case with LAN-Share or Editshare. We have for example shared disks that were connected with USB and Firewire. We have shared internal disks from one computer to another, allowing two editors to share media without the need of a separate server, since the server software also runs on the same version of OS X as the Avids and Final Cut.

Eventually we plan to make this software commercially available, but for now I would just like to hear peoples opinions and thoughts or ideas, what would be interesting for you in a software like this? We also plan to add iSCSI functions (to enable any drive as an iSCSI drive) and ATA-over-Ethernet, but that will be a bit in the future.

With hopes of a giving discussion:

David Norden