so who is using Active Storage?
by Alister Robbie
on
Aug 12, 2009 at 1:19:15 pm
Hey,
I thought I would break the ice in this new forum and ask the basic question. Is anyone in the COW community using the Active Storage XRAID solution yet? I have heard a bit of a murmur about the XRAID after a few recent industry events, and am considering it for my studio, possibly as part of an XSan.
So, does anyone have it deployed? Are you using it with an XSan? How does it stack up against the Promise RAID's and how similar is it to the old XServe RAID?
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Adam Hatch on Aug 12, 2009 at 3:48:25 pm
Alister,
Great question you ask. We have multiple units deployed with our current customers in the field. We have Direct Attached units from HDCAM-SR and 2K workflows. We also have Active XRAIDS running in multiple XSAN and MetaSAN configurations (Working great and it was a breeze to implement). We currently furnish Active raids to Disney, Top Rank, and others. They are extremely happy with the quality, performance, and cost to deploy their units and SAN.
There are no comparisons to the outdated Apple 2GB Fibre XRAID (Was a great solution and a quality product) and the Active XRAID. The Active RAID is designed for fast access and allows multiple streams of uncompressed HD playback w/o dropping frames in a shared environment.
If you have any additional questions, let me know.
-Adam
Adam Hatch
ProMAX Systems
Direct- (949) 861-2716
Professional Video Editing Systems
"Your Cure For Complexity"
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Diego Buenaño on Aug 13, 2009 at 12:41:02 am
Hi Al,
We have just finished a big installation @Televisa in Mexico. We put up together their whole tapless workflow for 2 series & 8 Special Shows. We built a 160TB SAN with 10 Active Storage units, plus 2 dedicated playout volumes 16TB each.
It took us between 2 and 3 minutes to set up each unit, and 5 hours each until the Luns were made. During the setup we had to minor setbacks that reassured how powerful this units are. First we dropped one Drive, while placing a unit in the rack. While we were building the RAIDs we found out the drive had broke, so we just change it for a spare, without stopping anything, and everything continued working perfectly.
The other one was during the demo, when one of the Controller Cards triggered an alarm, so we replaced while doing the demo, without stopping or shutting down anything, we even disconnected 2 fibres, and the workflow was not interrupted. We afterwards found out the controller was ok.
Speed is awesome, we are ingesting 4 Uncompressed 10 bits 1080i feeds, we are generating proxies, we are copying the finished files to the playout volumes, and it is being accesed by more than 25 users, never had a bottleneck.
For past experiences with the Vtrack, we can not make an honest comparisson as we really think Active Storage play on a different league.
Looks are great, GUI is great, speed is screaming, they are robust, I can assure you Active Storage is the way to go.
We had another unit running as a playout volume in Miami for a Streeaming TV Channel, playing DV25 files since December with no drops or failures.
Hope this makes sense for you.
Best
Diego
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Dan McNaught on Oct 7, 2009 at 8:52:24 am
Over the summer we've installed a number of Active Storage XRAID devices in school and college Music and Media suites across the UK. The XRAID units are very well built, better than the Promise V-Trak in my opinion. The software is far more in keeping with the Apple solution. The device looks the part too, which always gets our customers excited!
Also, the biggest pro is Active Storage's commitment to support. I have been quite staggered at the lengths the UK team have gone, in collaboration with the US team, to making sure that our customers are looked after when problems occur.
I would strongly recommend Active Storage, having worked with so many technology manufacturers. The value they place on relationship and support is refreshing in today's "fight-for-support" world! Simply quite exceptional these days. An example to many of us!
Lastly, but certainly not least, is the advantage that Active Storage have as the team who engineered and manufactured the Apple Xserve RAID. With this background of close-knit working with Apple, you can rest assured that their commitment to the Apple platform is second to none.
Active Storage clearly understand the expectations of Apple users with this strong product: simple to setup and use, reliable and performs well (for Media editing and Music Production environments). The appearance and quality closely resembles what you would expect for any Apple hardware.
I happily recommend this as a valuable part of any reasonable Apple solution.
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Mark Raudonis on Aug 29, 2009 at 3:02:23 am
After going to NAB this year and surveying the universe of choices out there, we
decided to go with Active storage. I'm glad we did.
Our X-SANs are a mix of old Apple X-Raids of varying sizes and ages and new Active Storage units. We
bought six fully loaded units and split them between two separate X-SANs that we operate. They've been
up and running under heavy use for a few months now, and so far, so good.
Great user interface. Can't wait for the iPhone app to go live. That's just too cool!
We do reality TV, and these drives support almost 100 users, with many different types of media from off-line RT up to XDCAM-HD and prores. I can't comment on the Promise drives since I've never used them, but if you're looking for a replacement for your old X-RAIDS, the Active Storage units fit the bill. Since we still have plenty of the X-RAIDS in use, I was particularly sensitive to the notion that they all "play nice" together. So far, they have.
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Nuno Martins on Sep 9, 2009 at 2:22:28 pm
Hi
Im from Terebite, the South African and sub-Saharan distributor for Active Storage, and since we took it on we are seeing more and more usage of the product on the market. We have integrated them into older Xsan environments still running Apple's Xraid without a hitch, we have also installed them as stock standard storage as well as disk to disk backup solutions. The look and feel of the units are great and they really fit in well with the Apple guys here.
We have found on the performance side the Active units really out perform the vtrak, and the manageability via the gui is something the end user really likes as its easy to find your way around. (Also waiting for iPhone App!!!)
We are finding more and more people moving to Active here and leaving the Vtrak behind - Great look, Great performance, Great Product!
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Ron Amborn on Sep 18, 2009 at 4:34:16 am
We here at Maxx Digital are getting great feed back on this fabulous replacement for for XRaid. We are currently recommending and selling Active Storage for all our high end Fiber Jobs. Please feel free to contact me or Bob Zelin at bobz@maxxdigital.com or ron@maxxdigital.com. The guys at active are great to work with.
Sincerely,
Ron Amborn President
Maxx Entertainment Digital
21562 Newland Street
Huntington Beach , Ca 92646
Direct 714-374-4944
Cell 714-713-4492 Fax 714-374-3404
ron@maxxdigital.com
www.maxxdigital.com
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Matt Bodman on Nov 19, 2009 at 3:22:15 am
Hi, we're using a 12TB SATA XRAID direct attached as an editbin. Our editors connect over copper. We're running the drives RAID 50. Works great, nice flashing lights.. what more do you want?? Active support has been great too.
Re: so who is using Active Storage? by Dennis Rosenblatt on Nov 19, 2009 at 1:39:55 pm
like everyone else, i had been waiting for years for apple to upgrade the xserve raid. when they didn't, i went looking for the best alternative and found it in the active xraid.
being a director/editor, i don't have engineers running around the building to help if there's a problem. i needed a true plug and play with support if needed. so off i went to NAB to look at everything that was out there including the promise drive. hands down the only logical choice was the active raid.
i've had a 16tb fibre box in my system now since may and haven't had anything but a great result with it.
i also have the piece of mind that if i have a problem, some vendor isn't going to tell me that the problem
is on the mac side and to go call apple.
these guys built the xserve raid and now built its successor. we're very lucky that they did.
dr
