A compact and elegant footprint for creative professionals.
The 41st IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Mike Shapiro and Jeff Bonwick, Co-presidents of Iodyne to learn about their latest storage creation for video, photo, and audio creative professionals and software developers.
Over the past decade, these professionals have been forced to choose between small but fast internal or external SSDs, or big, slow, bulky, and noisy hard-disk RAID arrays. Their most complex projects will often require both types of storage combined configuration, along with cloud services and backups.
About Iodyne
Iodyne is dedicated to providing Pro users with the best technology and tools to manage their creative assets. After more than 20 years designing some of the industry’s leading enterprise storage systems, including the revolutionary ZFS filesystem, industry-first Hybrid Disk/SSD ZFS Storage System, NVMe Fabrics protocol, industry-first NVMe pooled storage, and industry-first 100GB/s DSSD Storage System, founders Mike Shapiro and Jeff Bonwick created a company to bring industry-changing storage technology to Pro desktops and workgroups.
Introducing Pro Data
Pro Data is the fastest thunderbolt storage for M1 Macs and is the fastest Thunderbolt RAID array. It's available in 12TB or 24TB capacities. Up to 5GB/s performance. It's the first with 8 Thunderbolt ports, first Thunderbolt NVMe multipathing, storage handoff for workgroups, transactional RAID design for NVMe SSDs, end-to-end encryption and secure enclave, designed for repair and linked to the Iodyne Cloud to monitor performance and degradation.
Pro Data can connect to Mac, Linux, and Windows at the same time facilitating the most complex workloads. It can connect up to four computers at once -- there are eight posts, each with a group pairing. You can daisy chain multiple devices for expansion. It supports Time Machine and works natively as well as Carbon Copy Cloner web backup services. All of this is the size of a 15" laptop.
HDD + SSD RAID boxes are large, slow, and only connect to one drive. Also, there is no loud fan as on RAID boxes so Pro Data can be used on set during production and recording.
Pro Data is priced at $3,950 for 12T and $7,500 for 24T.
Transactional RAID System
Eliminates write hole (sage against power-fail), eliminates write penalty, needs no overprovisioning, needs no journaling, near-zero write amplification,
Detects and corrects silent errors, restripes around failed drives to restore full performance, RAID level configurable per container,
Hardware accelerated, firmware controlled, ECC memory protected
The way data is moving into virtual studios is in data layers. Additional value will be achieved by partnering with cloud providers.
Data coming from a camera or recording device into Iodyne is automatically encrypted and doesn’t need to be encrypted before it goes to the cloud.
Thunderbolt NVMe Multipathing
For the first time, multiple Thunderbolt paths are seamlessly combined to aggregate bandwidth. It is transparent to users and applications. Ports can hot-plug and hot-unplug on the fly. With 4X port pairs and 8X total ports, Pro Data can:
Connect up to four computers
Multipath to two computers simultaneously
Multipath to daisy-chain expansion
Design for Repair
Pro Data is "designed for repair" through a combination of industrial design considerations, product technologies, the Iodyne Cloud, a free extended warranty, and open repair documentation. Pro Data’s service panel unlocks with two standard screws and allows easy access and replacement of all the individual SSDs.
Iodyne’s software provides remote telemetry on storage health back to the Iodyne Cloud, which then dispatches spare parts automatically when needed. Users are empowered to repair their own devices, with all data protected by transactional RAID-6, and automatically refreshed and protected before, during, and after repairs.
Customers
Pro Photo: Shan-Lu Photography converted 24TB 10Gbe NAS system for professional photo archive to Pro Data. Adobe Lightroom workflow for photo editing and archiving runs 3X faster than NAS. The photo archive deduplication process that previously took overnight to run now takes an hour. All images are encrypted and protected by RAID 6 versus RAID 5.
Pro Video: Cintegral production technology for producers uses ultra-fast storage technologies. They are demoing Pro Data at USC’s Entertainment Technology Center as a new reference technology. They are also using the Optical Thunderbolt for 50m on-set connection between editors and DIT cart image capture.
Sustained Performance
Pro Data performs consistently across many hours versus Seagate FireCuda, Samsung X5, Samsung T7 Touch, and LaCie Rugged as measured by PugetBench from Puget Systems.
The initial burst only lasts one or two minutes with the exception of LaCie Rugged which runs at a 43 to 65% slower speed than Pro Data.
Garbage collection also affects the performance of the other drives.
This is the value of multiple drives working together
Puget Systems creates and evaluates custom workstations for content creators, engineers, scientists, and more. They are developers of benchmarking extensions for common apps like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.