Miller Wishengrad Post Chooses JMR FibreStream RAID

When the time came for Santa Monica-based facility Miller Wishengrad Post to select the newest storage solution for their digital editing suites, the company needed something affordable, extremely reliable and ready for immediate use. JMR Electronics, Inc., a leading value provider of scalable storage systems for video and data intensive applications, recently provided MWP with the new FibreStream storage system.

With performance speeds exceeding 1,300 MB/s, FibreStream quickly became a welcome addition to the studio’s existing workflow.

Miller Wishengrad Post is a boutique editing facility located in Santa Monica, Calif., and includes four edit suites and a graphics station. For more than 15 years, the company’s core services have included post-production for feature films and trailers, music videos and TV commercials. Editor Sean Leute researched several companies’ offerings for a technology solution that would satisfy the studio’s online content streaming needs, and was pleased to discover JMR and FibreStream.

"We were always looking for a cost-effective technology solution where we could share storage across our workstations, but it seemed that many of the available options didn’t fit our budget," Leute said. "But when we talked to JMR and researched their FibreStream system, we discovered that it would allow us to get twice the storage capacity for nearly half the cost."

Standalone or when added to an existing Storage Area Network (SAN), the FibreStream RAID array can be configured for RAID levels 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 10, 40, 50 or 60. Its rackmount enclosure contains 16 hot-swappable 3.5-inch disk drive canisters for 3 Gb/s SAS or SATA-2 disk drives, which creates a powerful and dense storage array of up to 32 TB (24 TB available now using 1.5 TB SATA-2 drives and up to 32 TB using upcoming 2 TB SATA-2 drives) in a single 3U RAID shelf. FibreStream is available with either two or four 4 Gb/s Fibre Channel host ports.

"FibreStream is very user-friendly," Leute said. "We really put it through its paces by streaming uncompressed 10-bit HD files online using Commandsoft FibreJet software, and I noticed no issues whatsoever with the system. The only way to truly test a system like this is to use it every day, so we moved all of our media onto the FibreStream, turned off our old SCSI drives and just ‘went for it.’"

MWP’s setup currently utilizes all four of the FibreStream’s host ports, and 16 TB of storage capacity. Another feature that impressed Leute about the system was its scalability, noting that "if we decide to expand the studio or add another workstation, it’s completely scalable to meet our needs."

To expand storage beyond the 16 internal drives, users can daisy-chain the FibreStream system to JMR’s BlueStor SAS JBOD Expansion unit – multiple expansion units can be connected in this manner to create truly customized storage.

"Today’s video post-production houses need fast and affordable RAID storage arrays, and FibreStream is the highest performance per dollar Fibre Channel system available on the market," said Josef Rabinovitz, JMR’s President/CEO. "The data-intensive nature of video editing requires a system that not only provides the speed and storage capacity to get the job done, but also the ability to reduce overhead and generate strong ROI. That is why our entire BlueStor line is a smart choice for content creators," he added.