Start-Up Profile: OpenDrives, to Complete Funding Soon

Company
OpenDrives LLC
[Sometimes we don’t understand how companies choose their name. Here it’s not a firm in open architecture with proprietary OS and no more in drives but subsystems. Editor]
 
HQs
Culver City, CA

Date founded
2011
 
Financial funding
Will completed series B funding round of $12 million led by return investor Tull Investments Group (Thomas Tull).
 
Revenues and profitability
Company is profitable but does not release any financials details.

Main executives
 
Jeff Brue is the founder. He was the IT director for the feature film Gone Girl and challenged with creating an infrastructure for a 6K production. He could not find a storage system that could perform in a 6K environment, so he hand-built a system that evolved into OpenDrives where the workflow allowed the team to work in near real-time rather than waiting hours for projects to load.

Chad Knowles, CEO since June 2014, was notably regional territory manager at EMC Isilon after being senior advisor for MediaBridge Capital and co-founder and CEO of OneHope.com.

Number of employees
30-50
 
Technology
NAS
 
Products description
Storage solutions provide the performance, capacity and flexibility for all types of media workflows in any resolution or codec (from standard definition to 8K) including video ingest, transcoding and rendering to editorial, VFX, archive and distribution.

• Avalanche
All-flash NAS starting at 28TB and scalable to multiple petabytes for demanding workflows for handling 4K, 6K, 8K, High Dynamic Range (HDR), High Frame Rate (HFR), and Virtual Reality (VR) content workflows; 18GB/s aggregate throughput and 5GB/s throughput to a single user

• Spectre
Hybrid flash (SSD/HDD) storage array starting at 72TB and scalable to multiple petabytes for multiple, concurrent workflows; turning workarounds into workflows by consolidating editorial, color and VFX onto one shared storage system; 9GB/s aggregate throughput and 5GB/s throughput to a single user

• Ridgeview
High density all-HDD storage array for nearline active archive uses cases; or raw media ingest and multi-petabyte content libraries; scalable to multiple petabytes; 5GB/s aggregate throughput; native NAS protocols (NFS,SMB)

• Opus (OS)
Software platform with simple way to configure, optimize, protect and manage storage volumes; detecting if the data has been corrupted and repairs the data in-flight as it’s being committed to disk; providing unlimited snapshots; backup up to 10TBs/hour (or 2GB/s) between OpenDrives storage systems; allowing administrator to send snapshots between OpenDrives storage tiers, to LTO libraries and to cloud backup targets like Microsoft Azure; compression and de-dupe

Start-up has developed this proprietary, patent-pending software platform to manage and tune its systems.   

Optimized for Adobe Premiere, Blackmagic, Davinci Resolve, Autodesk Flame
 
Release date
2016
 
Price
$100,000+
 
Roadmap
Entry-level system in the $35,000 range and a top-end enterprise, HA system to be announced ahead of NAB in April.
 
Distributors and OEMs
Firm is an OEM but does leverage a reseller channel.
 
Number of customers
100+
 
Customers
Include Turner Broadcasting, Joke Productions, Warner Brothers, Riot Games, Palo Alto Networks, SuperDeluxe, South Park Studios, NBC, NBC Universal, DirecTV, Pop TV, Nerdist (Legendary Digital), YouTube Nation, Gone Girl, MidHunter
 
Target market
Media and entertainment (feature film and television), new media (web content), medical imaging, corporate video, surveillance video
 
Main Competitors
Dell/EMC Isilon, Quantum