BERLIN, GERMANY — Story House Productions has upgraded and extended the shared storage network in its Berlin facility. The studio is home to a Facilis 448TB Hub Server Stack consisting of two TerraBlock 24D servers, TX16 expansion chassis and the Hub Server, which manages and controls traffic across the system. The new system was supplied and installed by Systempiloten, a Facilis authorized reseller.
Photo (L-R): Story House Productions’ Thomas Sassenberg and Systempiloten’s Thorsten Feldman
“We have used Facilis shared storage since around 2009, when our Washington, DC, facility installed a system, and based on their success, we followed suit,” explains Thomas Sassenberg, technical director, Story House Productions. “Our experience of the system since then has been so overwhelmingly good that when it came to upgrading our current system, there was really no other choice. It’s rock solid and always has been.”
With multiple facilities in the USA and Germany, Story House Productions creates, produces and delivers multi-platform content for major TV networks worldwide. The Berlin facility is the organization’s main production and post production hub for factual programming, producing around 150 hours of content per year.
“The content we deal with is 80 percent HD and 20 percent 4K,” says Sassenberg. “We’ve seen a significant increase in 4K work over the past 18 months and this will only grow. While we work in HD for offline and only move to 4K for final versions, we still need a robust environment to manage and store a growing volume of increasingly large files.
“The new system is so much faster and it can support many more streams, which has made us significantly more efficient - but what counts even more than performance is the stability and reliability of the system,” he adds. “Other shared storage systems on the market offer a lot of features, but the combination of price, performance and reliability puts Facilis at the top of the list every time.”
Sassenberg was also impressed with the sophisticated ability of the Hub Server to organize files. “The architecture of the Hub Server is really interesting. Previously, we would have had to add another server, and getting three servers to collaborate is much harder than two, so the improved architecture is key to the whole thing.”
Jim McKenna, VP sales & marketing for Facilis (https://facilis.com), adds, “When Storyhouse in DC was looking for a system almost 10 years ago, the feature set was very different. Still, the underlying technology was solid, and we’ve built upon that early design by adding more of the management, resiliency and performance features that keep customers like Story House re-investing with Facilis.”