Story House Productions Upgrades Storage Network With Facilis Solution

Story House Productions has upgraded its Berlin-based shared storage network with Facilis' 448TB Hub Server Stack.

Systempiloten, a Facilis Authorised Reseller, supplied and installed the solution, consisting of two TerraBlock 24D servers, TX16 expansion chassis and the Hub Server which manages and controls traffic across the system.

"We have used Facilis shared storage since around 2009 when our Washington DC facility installed a system, and based on their success we followed suit," said Thomas Sassenberg, Technical Director, Story House Productions. "Our experience of the system since then has been so overwhelmingly good that when it came to upgrading our current system, there was really no other choice. It's rock solid and always has been."

With multiple facilities in the USA and Germany, Story House Productions creates, produces and delivers multi-platform content for major TV networks worldwide. The Berlin facility is the organisation's main production and post-production hub for factual programming, producing around 150 hours of content per year.

"The content we deal with is 80% HD and 20% 4K – we've seen a significant increase in 4K work over the past 18 months and this will only grow," said Mr Sassenberg. "While we work in HD for offline and only move to 4K for final versions, we still need a robust environment to manage and store a growing volume of increasingly large files.

"The new system is so much faster and it can support many more streams, which has made us significantly more efficient - but what counts even more than performance is the stability and reliability of the system. Other shared storage systems on the market offer a lot of features, but the combination of price, performance and reliability puts Facilis at the top of the list every time."

Mr Sassenberg was also impressed with the sophisticated ability of the Hub Server to organize files. "The architecture of the Hub Server is really interesting - previously we would have had to add another server, and getting three servers to collaborate is much harder than two, so the improved architecture is key to the whole thing," he said. "You hardly know it's there, but it organises everything and it's the one server we have to go to. Before, we had to decide where to put things - now the Hub Server takes care of all that.

"As a smaller company, they can make changes quickly – for instance, we had a couple of compatibility issues and with two or three phone calls they had resolved them – you don't get that with larger organisations. Also, Facilis always seems to pick the right partners on the ground that are knowledgeable and responsive. Systempiloten has been supporting us for several years and the installation of this system was very easy – everything was set up over a weekend so we had no down time at all."

Jim McKenna, VP Sales & Marketing, Facilis, added: "When Storyhouse in DC was looking for a system almost 10 years ago, the feature set was very different. Still, the underlying technology was solid, and we've built upon that early design by adding more of the management, resiliency and performance features that keep customers like Story House re-investing with Facilis."

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