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Apple Begins Selling LumaForge Shared Servers With Up to 200TB Storage and Prices Up to $50,000

Wednesday December 12, 2018 8:52 am PST by Joe Rossignol
LumaForge today announced that its Jellyfish shared storage solutions are now available for purchase from Apple's online business store, with ultra-high capacities up to 200TB at ultra-high prices of up to $50,000 in the United States.


Jellyfish servers enable video production teams working on Macs to collaborate throughout the content creation process. Designed by professional filmmakers, editors, and colorists, LumaForge says the Jellyfish is compatible with major pro video and audio apps like Final Cut Pro X, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve.

There are three shared storage solutions:
  • Jellyfish Mobile - 32TB for $11,995.95 or 80TB for $19,995.95: Portable enclosure designed for small teams or teams without a server room infrastructure. Four 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports. Four 1-Gigabit Ethernet ports. 2,300 MBps available bandwidth. Enough to power 4K-8K workflows.
  • Jellyfish Tower - 120TB for $39,995.95: Designed for teams that have larger capacity needs. It's the size of a large PC tower. Eight 10-Gigabit Ethernet ports. Eight 1-Gigabit Ethernet ports. 4,400 MBps available bandwidth.
  • Jellyfish Rack - 200TB for $49,995.95: Identical in functionality to the Tower, but designed to easily fit into existing server racks.
Macs can be connected directly to a Jellyfish server using standard 1- or 10-Gigabit Ethernet cables. Once connected, the Jellyfish Desktop App for macOS automatically completes the setup process. All three have RAID protection.

LumaForge said that more than 200 companies, including Activision, Adobe, BBC, CBS Interactive, Disney, Google, NASA, Pandora, Reuters, Sony, and WeWork, rely on Jellyfish servers for video storage and collaboration.

In related news, LumaForge announced that Steve Bayes has made a significant financial investment in LumaForge and will join its newly formed Board of Advisors. Bayes was the senior product manager of Final Cut Pro at Apple for more than 12 years before retiring from the company in July 2018.

[ 99 comments ]


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mrat93
10 months ago

"32GB for $11,995.95"

:eek: That has to be incorrect.


Nah that sounds right in line with Apple’s pricing on storage.
Rating: 33 Votes
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Simmias
10 months ago
I ordered three of the 200TB models to back up my photo and adult video collections.
Rating: 23 Votes
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EiriasEmrys
10 months ago

That's about inline with what Apple charges.

These storage volumes sound kind of insane to me. Isn't a TB good for hundreds of hours of raw footage? What are you working on where you need immediate access to tens of thousands of hours of raw footage?

I'm under the impression that there's another, cheaper solution for archiving petabytes of stuff just for incase, where being able to have dozens of people access it is... not a requirement.



I work as a colorist, a terabyte is nothing these days. If you work with RED Helium footage, Phantom Flex, or ARRI RAW, you can easily fill up 20TB on a feature or 6-7 episodes of TV. As a consumer, its hard to imagine filling that much space, but at our business we go through 8TB a month in archive, 4-6 in working projects, then any features or tv shows are much much more (And we are a small shop). Then you have to remember that each of those should be backed up, so you double or triple that.
Rating: 16 Votes
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bstpierre
10 months ago
Are they compatible with Time Machine?
;)
Rating: 16 Votes
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brofkand
10 months ago

They are not backup servers.


Hobbyists don't understand that DIY solutions don't work when money is on the line.
Rating: 13 Votes
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nt5672
10 months ago

That's about inline with what Apple charges.

These storage volumes sound kind of insane to me. Isn't a TB good for hundreds of hours of raw footage? What are you working on where you need immediate access to tens of thousands of hours of raw footage?

I'm under the impression that there's another, cheaper solution for archiving petabytes of stuff just for incase, where being able to have dozens of people access it is... not a requirement.


At the studio I was responsible for 8 years ago we recorded about 1.6 TB of DVC Pro HD content per 8 hour day (50GB per hour times 4 cameras). This does not include audio. The studio ran 6 days per week often for 10 or 12 hours per day. Each program took several weeks to record and we had a dozen or so editors working from the SAN editing the programs with the intent to complete production before we ran out of storage. Which we often did and had to archive material off the SAN before its time.

These storage numbers seem kind of low to me considering 4K content. We paid 4 to 6 times these prices for our SAN. These seem like a good deal, for the purpose intended.
Rating: 12 Votes
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WestonHarvey1
10 months ago

Why is this even news...:rolleyes:

Very...VERY few people here on MR are in the market for this if any at those prices.


It is interesting because Apple is selling something in a product category it doesn't usually participate in.
Rating: 12 Votes
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thenewyorkgod
10 months ago

Apple moving into the server market?! What have we come to ...

Have you forgotten these?

Rating: 12 Votes
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dannyyankou
10 months ago
I mean I get that these are not for consumers, but they’re charging $375 per terabyte. That’s a bit excessive.
Rating: 10 Votes
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nt5672
10 months ago

Pointless for enterprise, just buy the PowerEdge R740xd2 for half the price, or the Apollo 4200 and use it exactly the same as one would with this overprices device, and you get a better SLA deal. Or just buy a tower with 3.5" drives if you really would need a tower.

And for small SMB:s and highend hobbyist just build it yourself for cheap.

Why would anyone buy this over any other offering on the market?


If you ever do multiple direct camera (professional applications) to disk in HD then you'll realize how silly this idea is. Simultaneous recording and editing shared HD content cannot even use regular switches. The requirements for streaming live content to disk puts any PowerEdge quivering and falling all over itself in very little time.

Edited: to change routers to switches. Thanks for pointing that out.
Rating: 9 Votes

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