"Fast access to and efficient management of data, and hardware, and particularly software innovations, such as Tiger Technology’s metaSAN, are the catalysts for success in today’s collaborative, heavy-bandwidth work environments."

 

Robi Roncarelli, Market Analyst, PIXEL Inc.

"I am giving metaSAN five stars! If I ever end up working in another facility that needs to implement a SAN, I will definitely recommend it. I’d also recommend it to anyone involved in video that needs a file-level sharing SAN."

 

Joe Kirby, Assistant Chief Engineer, FOX 54 – WZDX TV

"With metaSAN/metaLAN in place, every artist has instant access to data by simply clicking on the local hard drive in “My Computer” – and all this without having to perform sophisticated network administration."

 

Alex Rizov, FX Supervisor, Topform Studio

"I recommend metaSAN to anyone investigating a shared storage solution, especially to anyone Final Cut Pro based production house wanting to maximize their multi-station editing workflow."

 

Graeme Nattress, President of Nattress Productions Inc.

"metaSAN is the ideal SAN management solution for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Gigabit Ethernet networks. So far, we have tested metaSAN with Huge Media-Vault and Fibrenetix Storage systems, Qlogic SANBox switches, and Atto Celerity host bus adapters and have never experienced any compatibility issues."

 

Jörg Hoffman, PSIBER GmbH

"I’m using an HP xw9300 with 4 x SATA2 drives and a Bluefish444 HD Lust board. Whenever trying to capture DPX files, the system would run for 100-250 frames and then drops frames. After installing metaSAN and using DDO and FSO the system can now capture DPX files without any problem!"

 

Gerbrand De Ridder, Trans Tec bv

"Our customers have been clamouring for tools that will help them add intelligence to their workgroups. We are very pleased to be working with Tiger Technology to address this demand."

 

Howard Solomon, President, Integrity Data Systems

"By turning off-the shelf storage and networking components into versatile, easy to support, and highly scalable shared storage workgroups, metaSAN is ideally suited to solve a wide range of workflow configurations at a great price."

 

John Connolly, Midwest Media Group President

"metaSAN’s unique ability to allow multiple cross-platform users to share content and collaborate efficiently while maintaining very high bandwidth will afford us a highly efficient, reliable, centralized and secure storage solution."

 

Michio Fujii, CEO and President, MIC Assosciates, Inc.

DigiNovations: Migrating to metaSAN over a weekend

DigiNovation's requirements for shared storage are pretty simple - it has to be easy to maintain, it has to be easy to manage, and it has to be 100% reliable when it comes to data integrity.

DigiNovations (www.diginovations.com) is a small, innovative video production company in historic Concord, Massachusetts, telling the stories of companies, universities and individuals, and specializing in web-based video delivery.

With seven edit and postproduction seats, shared storage is a must. In 2008, senior editor and de-facto engineer Mike Chapman realized he had a problem. "We had just migrated to XDCAM and we were beginning the process of converting from PCs running Premiere to Macs running FCP," Mike remembered, "And it was apparent that we were outgrowing our existing shared storage software. It wasn't coping with the increasing load, and it required more and more of my time to manage - and I was hired to be a 'creative'!"

Replacing the existing legacy infrastructure with an all-in-one solution was out of the question. After talking to Bernard Lamborelle at NAB, Chapman came away impressed and he persuaded DigiNovations to give a green light to the conversion to metaSAN.

There was a further problem: With little time available in a busy schedule for an extended outage, the plant would have to be converted over a weekend.

"That was a little scary," Mike recalled, "But it went very well. I converted the existing PCs to metaSAN in a day. Then we emptied out a virtual volume on our storage, added it to a new metaSAN SAN definition, and started copying from the old system to the new. After that it was like dominoes. When folks came in the following monday, their systems were ready to go."

In early 2009, DigiNovations converted to an all-Mac infrastructure. "That went especially well," Chapman remembers. "Initially we had to have a PC managing the storage, but we needed to start integrating the Macs. Because the Macs couldn't access the existing storage over fiber because of a hardware limitation on the storage side, we equipped the Macs with MetaLan and kept 'mastering' with redundant PCs until we could finally replace the storage itself Until that happened, running cross-platform was no problem. The PC was administering NTFS volumes, but the Macs were reading and writing to those volumes as if they were HFS. It was great! Eventually we were able to replace the existing storage with a G-Tech unit and 'master' it with an Apple XServe, and that allowed us to use our fiber network once again. So now I have 7 Macs on fiber, writing to true HFS volumes and they scream. If anything, the installation process on the Macs was even easier. I had one or two small issues, but the Tiger support team was always on top of it and they were fantastic."

The switch to metaSAN means Chapman spends more time being creative for his producers and clients, and less time managing storage. That's fine with Mike: "The shared storage infrastructure now supports our 'creatives' - not the other way around!"

"My requirements for shared storage are pretty simple," Chapman told us, "It has to be easy to maintain, it has to be easy to manage, and it has to be 100% reliable when it comes to data integrity. I can't just back up 28 terabytes every night; I've got to have data integrity day-in and day-out. I used to worry about it constantly - if my data goes south, we're out of business! With metaSAN I can finally get what I didn't have for so long - a good night's sleep!"

Mike Chapman
Maynard, Massachusetts
617-699-6079