Rethinking enterprise storage
Nick Anderson
Issue: July/August 2020

Rethinking enterprise storage

What is the story of your team, your production, your company and the art that you make together? Every time you interact with your data, you write that story. Creative.space (https://creative.space) is the place where you tell that story, because Creative.space is where vision becomes digital reality. It's the home for your team's data, a safe place to put all your stuff in. It's a comfortable user experience for your team that connects you to your data through a web browser or directly on your desktop wherever you are. Its mission is to give creatives more time to be creative by eliminating technical bottlenecks through hardware, software and support.



Creative.space delivers high-performance storage to your facility, but is so much more than just a storage appliance. It’s a platform for creatives built on a radically different business model that provides the storage you need today and the ability to expand when you actually need to, based on fixed monthly payments, with support included. It is about people, communication and understanding — going way beyond hardware or even software. At the heart of all workflows, Creative.space uses storage as a lift off point for a white-glove service that helps your team amplify your latent creative potential. Rather than shell out five to six figures on a server that requires an additional annual service level agreement for reactive support, Creative.space provides hardware, software and proactive support as an all-inclusive OpEx expense billed monthly or annually based on your needs. The entry level mobile NAS solution, the 48TB Rogue, is available for $4,795, or can be financed with 0 percent interest for $199/month.

Performance, accessibility, and security make Creative.space truly the next generation of storage. Performance for post production means realtime playback with your workflow. Accessibility means you control who has access to what and when, no matter where they are or how they are accessing the network. Security means something different for each customer, so we start with built-in user authentication and expand into industry-standard best practices.

As a systems integrator, DigitalGlue spent over 18 years supporting storage solutions from other vendors. As technology advanced exponentially, expensive legacy storage architectures couldn't keep up. Three years ago, we discovered OpenZFS, a new architecture that answered big problems with the previous generation of storage by taking advantage of the latest hardware, integrating natively with every operating system, self-healing to prevent bit rot, and providing performance at low capacities without scaling through caching. The only issue was that it was designed for IT specialists and command-line junkies, not creatives. Seeing this technology's potential to radically disrupt the storage market, we saw an opportunity to offer a turnkey service that provides teams the performance modern workflows demand with a simple user experience through both intuitive software and personalized support.

Today, more than ever, we need better ways to connect, collaborate, and create whenever and wherever we are. COVID-19 has challenged everyone to figure out how to get their team access to data across both local and remote networks. The cloud looks like the answer, but it is separated and disconnected from the rest of your workflow. Media Asset Management systems add yet another thing to keep track of. Creative.space provides a unified solution to access shared spaces via our desktop app, web app, and FTP. Users connect to these spaces with the click of a button and can edit in realtime, even if the storage and workstations are in remote locations. Remote access via VPN is only limited by your Internet connection.

Nick Anderson is a Product Manager with Creative.space in Atlanta. Check out their Website at: