Production Sound & Video

30 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Spring 2021 constructed in 2017 using off-the-shelf components and featured a full ATX-sized chassis outfitted with eight spinning disk hard drives and a PCIe hardware-based RAID controller. Though several prospective competitors were already offering units with support for RAID (a process whereby multiple storage devices are pooled together to increase speed or create redundancy), all of the units that the Pronology team researched utilized software based or integrated RAID controllers, making them more vulnerable to failure or corruption as the components controlling the disk pool needed to expend resources on other tasks. By having a dedicated piece of hardware to control the RAID, the team was able to achieve a significantly more stable storage volume. In conjunction with the more robust case that offered improved durability, this prototype was a step in the right direction but it was not without shortcomings of its own. Local 695 President Jillian Arnold (then Vice President), member Nick Amico, and I put the prototype rNAS through its paces over the course of the following year. After stress testing it in every way we could imagine in both controlled and production environments, it was deemed too heavy and cumbersome, making it difficult to transport. The ATX chassis took up a large amount of space and could not be rack mounted, which made it unsuitable for the cramped confines of a production truck environment. Moreover, with the number of 4K productions already on the rise, higher write speeds were still going to be necessary for success. As testing progressed, the team began looking for ways to address these challenges. Fortunately, all of this was happening as the price of solid-state media was becoming more affordable, which presented an opportunity. Aroesty and his team began to experiment with using both consumer and enterprise grade solid-state drives in conjunction with their hardware RAID configuration and immediately decided that this approach would be essential to increasing read and write speeds to the point where the rNAS would be up for the task of recording 4K media. This also helped to address the issue of weight, as a standard two-and-a- half-inch solid-state drive weighs in at approximately a tenth of a pound, whereas traditional three-and-a-half- inch spinning disk units are closer to a pound and a half. This allowed the team to shed more than eleven pounds off the previous design with no discernable drawbacks. However, no existing two-and-a-half-inch form factor chassis available at the time met the necessary durability requirements, forcing the team to commission custom fabrications. After receiving input from a cross section of 695 engineers familiar with a wide array of production environments, a compact aluminum and steel design was settled upon. The result was the rNAS .m3, a lightweight solid-state network attached storage system ready to take advantage of the complete bandwidth of a 10g network environment. For more than a year, 695 engineers have put it through its paces it in a diverse variety of broadcast television environments, including the Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, and MTV Video Music Awards. Now, with the data collected over the past four years, Aroesty is proud to release the rNAS .m4, a modest redesign of that capitalizes on the successes of the .m3 while adding subtle improvements where needed. Newer solid-state drives boast longer life expectancies than those released even a few years ago, giving the .m4 a longer product life than its predecessor without requiring maintenance. The new chassis has been designed to easily integrate into a rack-mounted environment, making the devices convenient for long-term storage while remaining quite portable. The body can conveniently fit into a custom-designed insert carry-on suitcase and has been ruggedized for vibration and impact resistance, allowing multimillion-dollar productions to transport their content without fear of checking luggage. The device can "We couldn't find anything that could sustain the kind of write speeds we needed while also being portable and rugged enough to be practical in a production environment... We realized that we needed to build our own." –Jon Aroesty

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