The new FastNAS Generation 2 offers greatly improved performance for today’s real-world workflows that typically require an effective multi-tasking storage system that enables fast simultaneous reading and writing of data, according to the company.

This comes as production and post production workflows are becoming ever more complex. Storage systems have to support not just ingest and editing, but also rendering, archiving, cloud access and, increasingly, collaborative remote and home working. This all puts a greater strain on shared storage, which is now expected to support large numbers of concurrent processes, in turn increasing load on available bandwidth.

FastNAS is built on three unique key technologies from GB Labs, each of which contributes to the speed increase. At the heart of the product is the Velocity RAID engine (VRE) which controls and manages the disk array. The new version adds increased intelligence, aimed at delivering more performance from a simultaneous mix of tasks.

VRE is coupled with Nitro, the GB Labs NVME acceleration tool, which is a major contributor to the speed boost in revision 2. On top of that is layered Blueshift, which enables the architecture of FastNAS to operate on a conventional network and deliver to clients over standard protocols. This helps serve media content with low latency to large numbers of concurrent users.

“In any normal storage system, simultaneous read and write of data is the overhead,” said Dominic Harland, CEO of GB Labs. “The more simultaneous accesses and processes, the more latency builds and thus the overhead grows exponentially. This is why users become dissatisfied with the performance of shared storage. FastNAS generation 2 is built to mitigate this significantly.”

The new version of FastNAS launched on 9 November 2021, and is available for immediate delivery from GB Labs.