Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/477832
4 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2015 STORAGE SOLUTIONS years ago, and it was probably the only one that was completely American made," says Steve Katz, vice president of sales at JMR. "As everything migrated to Thunderbolt-2, we started to develop our Thunder- bolt-2 products, which are designed, developed and manufactured here in California." The new Lightning products offer affordable and powerful Thunderbolt-2 to PCIe expansion for both mobile and fixed media-centric applications, where ruggedness, longevity and absolute data integrity are required. They're perfect choices for users of MacMini, MacBook and Mac Pro, which have only Thunderbolt expansion available. "The post production and DI markets have big Mac followings; the Mac I/O is Thunderbolt," says Katz. "Almost everyone wants to add peripherals and there's no way to plug them in other than by Thunderbolt. Our products convert Thunderbolt to PCIe to make these peripherals usable. If you want to add a 10Gb network connection for fast editing response, if you want to use Red Rocket or after-market GPUs, if you want to ingest material with AJA Kona cards — these are all PCIe peripherals. You just plug them into our boxes and off you go." Katz explains that JMR's "desktop/rackmount con- version product matches the industrial design of our extremely successful Pro Bracket line. It allows installation in various configurations and is self powered and cooled." A Lightning RAID version adds 8-drive RAID storage and an internal hardware 6GB/s SAS RAID controller. And an additional product builds on Lightning RAID by offering mounting for a Mac Pro in the same unit. "It's extremely versatile," Katz says of this product. "It turns a Mac Pro into a very powerful desktop product with expansion capabilities. The Mac Pro slides into it; all USB, network and audio I/O ports have been brought to the front panel for easy connections; Thunderbolt ports have been brought to the rear panel and connected internally to drive the PCI extender and RAID. "The units with the 8-drive RAID system on board are available in both desktop and rackmount configurations, as is the tower, which contains the RAID and Mac Pro mounting," he says. All of the Lightning products are expandable by daisy chaining them to other Thunder- bolt devices. They are finished in glossy black powder coat to match the new Mac Pro series but will be made available in other color schemes as required for OEM branding opportunities. Lightning products are attractively priced and will be shipping shortly after NAB once the Intel certification process has been completed. JMR products are 100 percent designed and manufactured in the US. G-TECH USER VINCENT LAFORET Vincent Laforet (http://storehouse.com/air) has enjoyed a distinguished career as a photographer for top mag- azines and leading newspapers, and as a commercial director for major brands. His first feature film is now in development, and he's in the midst of an ambitious on- line project, Air, in which he's shooting aerial night views of cities worldwide. He has already posted images of Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Las Vegas, which have been seen by more than 40 million people. Next up: some European cityscapes. "I was ready to say goodbye to my photographic career when I started Air, and now I'm getting a tremen- dous amount of support behind it to take this project worldwide," says Laforet. Producing Air means accumu- lating lots of data and needing reliable storage solutions. Laforet has been using G-Technology (www.g-tech nology.com) storage for the last half-dozen years. He maintains two 24TB G-Speed Studio XL RAIDs for of- fline storage and one 64TB Studio XL for online storage in each of his offices in New York and LA. "I'm shuttling lots of data for Air," he reports. "I make a copy or three of everything I shoot. I keep about 100TBs online at all times — work going back six months or a year. I can access it from anywhere in the world." For Air, Laforet says he shoots about 5,000 images per hour at 12fps or "close to 100 gigs with every flight — with lots of vibration from the helicopter. So I have a massive amount of files to go through and edit. Speed Vincent Laforte has G-Tech storage on both coasts.