A Cross-Platform Add-On or All-in-One Option to Share Files and Remove IT Hassles and Costs
Shared storage should be an easy fix that goes about its business in the background while files move seamlessly among editors and motion graphics artists. But sharing files across a network is rarely as simple as it sounds—especially when adding the function for the first time—and usually requires a dedicated IT staff to routinely troubleshoot the bottlenecks when multiple operating systems, resolutions and file types get shared within a facility. At crunch time, when files need to move swiftly at various resolutions across different pipes, nobody wants to sit and wait while the network catches up.
To solve this problem, especially in small- to mid-sized facilities new to shared storage or expanding for the first time, shared storage developer Tiger Technology has introduced a new series of products that takes a software-to-hardware a la carte approach. Each product in the series, which includes Tiger Store, Tiger Box and Tiger Serve, supports 1 GB, 10 GB Ethernet, 8 GB Fibre Channel, 16GB Fibre Channel and Adobe, Apple, Avid and more post workflows on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux systems. The line-up was introduced at IBC last fall, but the company presented it as a shipping product at NAB.
Based in Sofia, Bulgaria, Tiger Technology is best known in Europe for its file-sharing product metaSAN, which it introduced ten years ago. According to marketing manager Angus Mackay, the new series is built on a newly developed intelligent storage workflow engine that takes the best of metaSAN and adds more easily managed and expandable workflows that scale across SAN, LAN or NAS storage architectures. A Web UI lets users easily set up, configure and maintain all of the products in the series.
Tiger Store software, to be used on top of a facility's existing disc-based storage, allows multiple users to share metadata and media while an intelligent engine automatically optimizes and defragments file sequences in the background so there is no need to log off to keep the network humming along at optimal speeds and efficiency. Tiger Store is meant to be budget-friendly and is priced accordingly, depending on your network: $300 for 1 GbE, $845 for 10GbE and $900 for Fibre Channel.
At the other end of the spectrum are the Tiger Box appliance and Tiger Serve. Tiger Box, or T-Box, is a customized, plug-and-play hardware appliance that controls metadata and media, provides unlimited client connectivity through a built-in server and stores 16 TB of data from across the facility in one rack-mounted box. The T-Box also lets facilities control both Ethernet and Fibre-Channel networks from a single appliance and starts at about $28,000. Tiger Serve, a two-RU server-class system, is flexible and powerful enough, says Mackay, to handle 4K workflows. It also includes a proprietary tiering and replication module that ensures files are stored and archived properly for years to come.
Tiger Technology: www.tiger-technology.com/
