GB Labs - FastNAS Generation 2
Storage
Today’s production and post is built around networked clients – graphics, editing, archiving and delivery – with users locally, in collaborative workflows at remote locations, and working from home. All the functionality demanded of a shared storage network today – ingest, archiving to the cloud, rendering and more – stresses the system. Users of conventional storage systems are finding that performance drops unexpectedly: this is because the need to serve large numbers of read and write clients simultaneously exceeds its capabilities.
The GB Labs approach to this problem has always been to provide NAS control which delivers market-leading performance, while fitting into a standard network without the need for complex configuration or adaptors. Now we have introduced a completely new version of FastNAS, which brings exceptional performance and stability to any size of network and any capacity of storage. The original FastNAS led the market in terms of speed and capacity. The new version is ten times faster, handling sustained data rates of up to 4 gigabytes a second, for all the performance any facility needs.
FastNAS Generation 2 is built on three key technologies: • The Velocity RAID engine (VRE) which controls and manages the disk array, and now has increased intelligence to deliver very high throughput. • Nitro, the GB Labs NVME acceleration tool.• Blueshift, which provides the interface between the specialist architecture of FastNAS and the clients across the conventional network, ensuring that FastNAS is truly plug-and-play and can be in full performance revenue service within 15 minutes of unboxing. All three elements have received huge speed boosts in version 2, and together they provide the remarkable transformation in productivity. This performance boost is delivered at the same price point as the original FastNAS. Audiences expect very high production levels in everything they watch; advertisers want their brands portrayed in the best possible way; producers want their content to realise their visualisations. All this means that the demands on post production continue to grow.
At the same time, the pressure is on to deliver the work more quickly. And skilled, creative artists do not want to feel their time is being wasted by unresponsive technology, preventing them from going the extra mile. The bottleneck in most facilities is the shared storage, which can become sluggish as the task load grows. The reputation of GB Labs is in delivering high performance storage systems. The new version of FastNAS takes this to another level, boosting sustained data rates by 1000%. And all in a device which is simple and quick to self-install, so there is no downtime and no learning curve. FastNAS Generation 2 is set to transform post by eliminating shared storage bottlenecks, allowing creative artists to deliver better work more quickly.
