With offices in LA, NYC and London, Nomad provides creative editorial, visual effects, graphics design, finishing and sound design services for commercials, internet advertising and feature films. A large percentage of its work is in commercial editorial for some of the biggest brands in the world including Starbucks, Nissan, and Samsung.

“When we first moved into shared storage, we wanted something robust that wouldn’t break the bank,” explains Nomad's technical producer Matthew Poletto. “We were looking for something that was easy to setup and administer, as we certainly didn’t want to pay $20K- $30K a year in support costs. We were also very attracted to not having to pay per-seat licenses for each client connection.”

Nomad cuts on Adobe Premiere Pro CC. Facilis TerraBlock is the central repository for projects and media in the offline edit workflow. All editing work is performed in ProRes LT format to keep material in an HD format while maximizing available space. Nomad uses Flame Assist to pull material from the TerraBlock storage in to the Autodesk Flame finishing suite.

“With the amount of media and clients we have flowing through the building, we prefer to work in the traditional offline/online way,” added Poletto. “Even though the Facilis and Premiere Pro CC workstations can handle 4K or greater playback, it’s not efficient for us to work in that way since we have to maximize the use of our storage.”

Client workstations at Nomad NYC are predominantly connected via Fibre Channel, with Ethernet networking available as a backup. According to Facilis a key benefit which it offers that few other storage vendors provide is the ability to support both Ethernet and Fibre connections without added complexity.

“The Facilis user interface is very streamlined with little to get in the way of an end user. It does not require an IT expert to administer,” says Poletto. “The cost benefit becomes very apparent when comparing systems if you have to pay for IT support for the more complicated SANs.”