Budget RAID 5 shared storage from EditShare at IBC 2013

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Singe user external high speed RAID drives are pretty common. But what about if you need to share media across multiple users? EditShare displayed a new budget shared storage solution at IBC 2013.

Let's say you have an external hard disk array and want to share that media with others. There are two ways of performing this successfully. Either a dedicated computer has to share out the drive and you connect to that, or one of the workstations shares out the media. Both are not ideal and there will be speed issues to contend with.

So when we saw the new Ultra from EditShare at IBC we were very curious to see what the box could do for the price.

The Ultra is small Linux based unit with 4 enterprise specification 7200 RPM hard disks set at RAID 5. This combination can support eight streams of ProRes422. Out of the back there are two GigE ethernet connections that can be directly connected to clients, or combine them together for more edit stations via a switch.

There is a front end admin tool that allows for the creation of user accounts and spaces for media and projects. The Ultra includes EditShare's file-level sharing so users can read and write to the same volume simultaneously. read more...