Terrablock 24d vs ISIS 5000

Hi guys, I am looking to replace my current lanshare and Im looking at Terrablock 24d and ISIS 5000... we are a Sony EX3 xdcam EX 35mb shop... we use AVID, Premiere pro, and FCPX... 15 clients..
IF you guys could shoot me your experience with these...
Thanks so much.
Josh

with the low bandwidth that you need (35mb/sec from XDCamEX) - either system will work for you. With higher bandwidth - full res ProRes422HQ, etc. or even uncompressed HD - there is no question that the Terrablock 24d is a MUCH better solution - it is much faster. ISIS 5000 will only provide you with about 100MB/sec per client - which is perfect for your application, but not for lots of streams of higher resolution. Again, doing DNxHD145 with an ISIS 5000 works perfectly - it depends on your application. The Facilis is faster.

But there is a better way to choose - and you should find this to be the easy deciding answer for you. Call AVID support - try to get help. Now, call Facilis support - you tell me, who answers the phone quicker, who is there to give you support right now ?

You will find the answer to this, by making two phone calls.

Bob Zelin

Hi Shane -
we all know what is going to happen when he tries to call AVID.

Bob Zelin

lol.. well, being an AVID user for the last 10 or better years.. I know the tribulations of calling AVID.. never been so aggravated. I all but quit calling. About the only time I ever get any help is when I need a license activated for Media Composer... and even that was a 12 step process.. so if Facillis even answers with a hello on the other end.. they already won. That said I did have one guy that was helpful from Avid storage group.. got his contact info.. had another issue crop up and called his number.. "he know longer works here" was what I got.

[James McKenna] "The best case scenario for optimized video storage is a single client reading as large a file as possible. Like 4K DPX, or even better, 4K streaming formal like QT. When doing that, we get into the 900MB/sec range. The best sustained throughput we qualify through published stream count is around 700MB/sec."

Thank you, it's really not bad for a 10GbE link.

Do you (plan to) offer purely NAS products? Seems that eliminating Fibre and the associated SAN functionality, will shave some of the costs off both the storage unit and the client's investment into SAN? For 15 editors working with HD dSLR footage, it seems that 700-900MB/s aggregate bandwidth should be enough, even if everyone piles on to it simultaneously. (I am just guessing of course.)

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 - Los Angeles, CA

ok. good info guys.. just need some info on what ( besides crappy support from avid) makes TerraBlock better than ISIS5000..

when you work in agencies like mine.. all the high ups want to know is bullet points.. it does this.. that .. the other.. while avid does that .. not this.. and won't do that.

appreciate all the info! and if you have any personal reasons why you like Terrablock over AVID share away..

Josh -
not meaning to be rude (ha ha - I am always trying to be rude) - but exactly what are you trying to determine in your comparison ? The Facilis is dramatically faster than AVID ISIS 5000 simply because they are using Fibre Channel. And you get more storage for the money, and better support for the money. The AVID ISIS 5000 in it's basic setup is 1GbE only. You can add a single 10GbE Myricom card PER ISIS ENGINE (only one per chassis) to achieve speeds similar to Facilis. The AVID ISIS 5000 maxes out at 32 TB - this means that they are using an older style 3g chassis that can only support 2TB drives maximum (you cannot put 3TB drives into an ISIS 5000). And they way it is configured, they have 3 groups of 5 drives RAID 5 (one is a hot spare) so you only get 22TB of usable storage for your 32TB investment.

Does it work well with AVID if you are doing DNxHD145 - sure it does. The ISIS 5000 is teriffic for what it does, and it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with than the old AVID Unity. But is it better than a Facilis Terrablock. Don't be silly.

Bob Zelin

Sorry to dig up an old thread.

I'm curious - what solution did you end up going with Josh? Are you happy with the purchase?

This post always comes up when you search for "ISIS 5000" in Google, so I though it was worth noting one addition to Bob's comments in case others are making a similar decision...

You can actually scale the ISIS 5000 from 16 to 96 TB (12 to 72 TB with RAID) or 32 TB to 192 TB (24 TB to 144 TB with RAID) and from 4 to 90 switched client connections with additional chassis and switches.

It's also worth noting that Avid is currently offering some pretty amazing trade-in deals at the moment, so you can trade in your old LANSHARE dongle, and get a substantial amount off an ISIS purchase.

Bob has pretty much summed up all the big bullet points in regards to ISIS versus Terrablock - but to just play the devil's advocate for the moment, I will say that a lot of the really big hire companies I've worked with that do big OB's, temporary TV studio setups, etc. all prefer to use the ISIS, because it's built like a brick, and is extremely reliable. You can also build a lot of redundancy into the system - so that if a chassis falls over, the end user doesn't even notice. Because Avid only support a very limited range of switching and network hardware (Cisco and Force10) - it also means that once you build an ISIS system, it's extremely easy to fault find as everything is very well documented.

That of course is not to say that the Terrablock isn't used in these situations as well - because it certainly is - but I thought it was worth noting that on average, when I speak to technicians on the field, for mission critical jobs, they "trust" an ISIS setup over a Terrablock setup in most situations.

I think one of the reasons the ISIS is so popular, especially in the enterprise, big facilities and in television land is because people just trust the product. It may not be the fastest, and it certainly isn't the cheapest, but Avid has spent many years improving and perfecting the technology to make it work perfectly with their editing software. Big businesses trust other big businesses.

That said... now days there are PLENTY of other products (such as the Terrablock) that are really giving the ISIS a run for it's money. Almost every single editing storage solution offers the exact same "Unity-emulation" which wasn't the case a few years ago. Editshare, Dynamic Drive Pool, FlavourSys Strawberry, xMCore... there are now a heap of systems out there. And now that products like Avid Sphere & Adobe Anywhere are starting the surface, this will probably change the game entirely once again...

My 2c.