Jim Tucci, CTO at Archion, shares the history of the digital storage company he helped start, back when 1 gig was big.

How long have you been at Archion?
Since Archion’s inception…I’m one of its founders, so I’ve been there a while, about ten years.
How did you get into working with storage?
I sort of back-ended into storage as someone who was a user of storage products for digital video. Our background goes back to the to the very, very first attempts at NLEs, around 20 years ago-products like the CMX Editing systems and the Edit Droid systems and the Montage systems. If you’re not familiar with the Montage system, it used digital images, but, for the most part, when it played its pictures back, it did what we do with hard drives now, but with beta tapes. As users, we realized that existing storage systems just did not cut the mustard in our business, so we started putting a lot of engineering hours into developing something new. We soon had big companies showing interest and when you have big companies coming by you tend to say, well let’s start a company. So we started Archion.
What kinds of projects has Archion been used for?
One of the first films to use Archion 10 years ago was [Terrence Malick’s] The Thin Red Line. At that period of time, everything was 1 Gig fibre, all on copper, and raid systems were available but unbelievably expensive. Fibre channel switches were $70,000 range for an 8 port switch. The largest hard drive we had at the time was 23 Gigs, in a 5 ¼” full height format….and Malick needed a terabyte. Now that seems like such a small amount because we have a single drive that’s a terabyte, but when you’re trying to build that with 23 Gigs AND have a full hard drive RAID, it’s a lot. We had 8 Avids on that system. At the time Avid’s fibre channel sharing storage hardware and software was only capable of running 3 and we had 8. That legacy is still around in the Synergy HDu product.

Terrence Malick went ahead and did “The New World” on an Archion box. Archion has done 50% of Terrence Malick’s films.

So you created Synergy specifically for Avid Unity?
Yes, to give Avid Unity what it has not had up until the first. HDu is the third generation of the Unity [compatible] product. It started off with the Synergy plus system and then from there it was Synergy HD and now Synergy HDu. So those are three generations of a hardware RAID product for Unity that Archion.

Every one of those products will work with each other. The product may be end-of-life, like Synergy Plus, but we didn’t obsolete it. Our feeling is, you invest with us and that investment keeps on going: You don’t have to throw it away.

When can we expect the next version of Synergy?
You can expect a higher performance Synergy product coming. You’re going to see 8 Gig fibre channel. You’re going to see a higher performance Synergy product. We’re also going to be putting out a new Node system, our SANS system, Alliance in our Node. And you’re going to be seeing file-level locking. Currently we have volume-level locking. This’ll be around NAB. As with all the Synergy products, it will not obsolete the other versions we have out now.