Tolis Group Rolling Out Ingest, Edit, and Archival Solution

TOLIS Group, Inc. announce its ArGest line of storage and archival solutions for producers of creative art.

Now, editors, videographers, music production/front-of-house teams, photographers, and other creative professionals in the field have a portable, high-performance tool to enhance their workflow and output: using an integrated unit.

ArGest – a concatenation of Archival and Ingest – units are self-contained, portable solutions providing both edit system-expanding disk storage and LTO-5 or LTO-6 (starting in January/13) tape archival/backup in an easy-to-use road warrior configuration – just add MacBook Pro. The right-sized travel cases (desktop or rack) are also available. The ArGest technology is an expansion of TOLIS Group’s BRU PE bundle solution set.

ArGest units are available in HDD and SSD capacity configurations providing ~500MB/s read and write for the HDD and ~800GB/s read and write for the SSD versions via SAS or Thunderbolt connectivity in a portable and affordable package for both Mac Pro and all Thunderbolt-enabled Mac systems.

"In developing the ArGest solution, we wanted to bring storage and archival together in an easily accessible package," said Tim Jones, president and CTO of TOLIS Group. "To be able to deliver a product that provides performance and proven data reliability in a portable package was our ultimate goal. We’ve succeeded with ArGest on all fronts."

With sustained media ingest speeds of over 800MB/s (SSD systems), 500MB/s (HDD systems), LTO-5 archive write speeds of 140MB/s (.5TB/hour) and LTO-6 speeds of over 180MB/s (.65TB/hour) using a choice of included BRU Producer’s Edition or BRU Server software, the road is no longer a dangerous place for projects generating large amounts of data. No more stacks of Firewire drives or long FTP sessions.

"Location shooting for commercial projects takes the Tallgrass team all over and the need for an easily portable storage and archival solution became more important as our shoots grew from 100’s of GB to 10’s of TB of data," said Jeffrey Lamont Brown, director and executive producer at Tallgrass Pictures LLC. "In our tests with the ArGest Cube HDD 20, we were able to simultaneously ingest from a USB-3 REDMAG reader at full speed, archive data to LTO-5 tape using BRU Server, and playback RED 5K shots in REDCINE-X at 24fps on a Thunderbolt-enabled MacBook Pro. All from an easily portable wheeled case that is as at home in a hotel room as in a studio. Being able to archive our dailies to LTO tape makes it much easier to sleep at night."

In addition to being fast, these systems are quiet – more than 40% quieter than a standard external LTO-5 tape drive. Additionally, the performance of both the SSD and HDD solutions, as well as their quiet operation, make editing on the road responsive and pleasant – especially when compared to USB or Firewire solutions.

All ArGest units are 6GB SAS and come with the listed disk storage, LTO-5 or LTO-6 (beginning Jan/13) tape drive, ATTO Technologies ExpressSAS H680 HBA (R680 RAID configuration also available), SAS cables, Media, Cleaning Cartridge, BRU PE 3.x or BRU Server Basic Edition license, 3-year hardware warranty and 1-year software support and maintenance. Thunderbolt connectivity kits also include the Sonnet Echo Express Pro Thunderbolt to PCIe chassis and 2m Apple Thunderbolt cable that integrate into the travel cases.

Prices start at $6,199 for SAS and $6,898 for Thunderbolt 2TB of HDD and LTO-5 tape drive. Capacities available to 4.5TB of HDD and 3TB of SSD.