Small Tree Mac-Based Shared Storage For 8fish

For more than a decade, 8fish has worked seamlessly with ad agencies across the United States to provide impactful creative animation and effects to generate results for their clients. Tired of running "sneaker net" in their Salt Lake City facility, with editors running from one workstation to the next copying files as drives continued to pile up and tracking project locations became more difficult, 8fish recently installed shared storage technology from Small Tree.

Designer of simple-to-install, inexpensive networking and shared storage products for professional video and audio editors using Mac OS X, Small Tree provided 8fish with a bundled Ethernet solution reaching Fibre Channel performance. To facilitate workflow, custom integrators TV Specialists provided 8fish with Small Tree’s Edge-corE ES4524D and PEG4, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and 4-port Ethernet card, respectively.

"We’ve been looking at SANs for a long time, but unfortunately, the majority of options fell well outside our budget," said Cody Skinner, director of video production for 8fish. "With the Small Tree solution, we’ve been able to achieve the performance we were looking for at half the cost."

"This technology makes a lot of sense for smaller facilities such as 8fish that aren’t working with uncompressed HD, but are taking MPEG2 35Mbit streams straight off the camera," Skinner continued. "Small Tree’s Gigabit Ethernet shared storage technology easily handles these files. In the end, we simply wanted our six workstations to be able to read, write, copy, digitize, play and render files concurrently and we’ve been able to do that flawlessly with the Small Tree equipment."