Tolis Group Unveiling Storage Expansion Chassis for ArGest Line

Keeping up with the demand for digital
asset and edit storage in the film and television production space,
TOLIS Group, Inc.
announced the availability of the new ArGest
Rack Mod160, ArGest Rack Mod240 and ArGest Rack Mod320 storage
expansion chassis.

These 2U rackmount expansion chassis
interconnect with a customer’s existing ArGest Rack solutions to
expand the available disk storage from the current capacities of 3TB
in SSD and 4.5TB in HDD configurations to a maximum added expansion
capacity of 448TB of raw, unformatted storage.

"We were very pleased with the
recognition and response that we received with the announcement of
the ArGest line at the end of last year," said Tim Jones,
president and CTO of TOLIS Group, Inc., "but the one request
that we continued to receive was for larger capacity points within a
studio environment. While 2TB of SSD works well for a remote DI setup
for dailies or simple shoots, the available capacity points didn’t
allow for a similar layout and data management workflow in a studio
environment, where much larger collections of data were utilized.
Since the ArGest line was designed with expandability in mind,
providing a modular growth solution for such an environment was an
easy next step."

The ArGest Rack units are available in
capacity points of 16, 24 and 32TB of unformatted disk space
per module, and may be expanded up to 14 units for a maximum total
ArGest capacity of 452.5TB of unformatted storage. The units may be
combined into a single, large storage well, or split into subunits
for specialized configuration needs. The use of the ATTO ExpressSAS
R680 RAID Host Bus Adapters provides a range of configurability with
the high levels of reliability and performance. Combining that
storage with the ArGest tape solutions allows the user to provide
nearly infinite near line and offline archival capacity through the
use of HP LTO technologies.

"The expandability provided by
the total ArGest solution allows for the user to start at a storage
capacity that meets their needs today, while knowing that they can
easily expand their solution as their data needs grow,"
continued Jones. "Being able to minimize initial buy-in for
storage and archival, while knowing that future expansion doesn’t
mean scrapping their initial investment and starting over is a very
important consideration for customers in today’s tight economy.
ArGest provides that."

The ArGest solution family is designed
using enterprise components instead of lower cost consumer components for reliable and high performance ingest and editing
operations, as well as speed archival of assets in a single, bundled
solution. Combining HP’s LTO tape technologies with the TOLIS Group
BRU PE or BRU Server software for tape archival management, data is
protected through the process by insuring that all data
written to LTO tape is protected from end to end. The BRU format used
provides performance (over 180MB/sec or .64TB/hour with LTO-6) and
verifiable and auditable tape-based data storage, whether for
short-term client deliverables and exchange or long-term archival
operations.

The RAID-configured ArGest Rack product
line pricing starts at $7,944 for 2TB of HDD disk storage and
LTO-6 drive in a 1U rack chassis, or $10,244 for 2TB of high
speed SSD storage w/LTO-6, and includes listed disk storage, LTO-6
tape drive, ATTO ExpressSAS R680 RAID HBA, SAS
cables, LTO-6 Media, Cleaning Cartridge, BRU PE or BRU Server Basic
Edition license, 3-year hardware warranty, and 3-year software
support and maintenance.