LumaForge Rolls Out a Massively 'Bigger, Faster Jellyfish'

Shared storage is a vital but terrifying part of the film industry. To that end, LumaForge has launched the new Jeyllfish BFJ, which is Bigger, Faster, and still a Jellyfish...only it offers up to 600TB, maximized bandwidth, and has incredible expandability of up to 20 HHD and 100 Flash capacity.

For those who don't know, the Jellyfish is a shared drive that is designed by filmmakers, for filmmakers with the goal of ultimate simplicity for your workflow. We got our hands on one for a few weeks last summer and found the process to be far easier than shared networked drives have any right to be. The unit let us take it to set (with its convenient carry handle), and have 4 machines hooked up to it downloading, processing, reviewing and assembling footage seamlessly. When we wrapped, the unit could walk straight over to post, all at 10GB ethernet speeds, with very minimal setup required.

The unit we tested was around $10,000, which is pricey but not entirely out of reach for independent productions and definitely a reasonable price point for a small production company or post house.  However, sometimes you aren't a tiny company, but a big one, with much bigger storage needs for vast libraries of material and the need to pull that big material (maybe 8K dailies) to many team members at once. 

For that LumaForge has released the BFJ, which has a much higher maximum capacity (up to 100gb/s, instead of the 40gb/s you could get over fiber and 10gb/s over copper), an 840TB configuration that includes 30TB of flash storage, 1TB of RAM and 28 cores of Intel processors. Most of us don't need anywhere near that kind of horsepower, but if you do, it's good to have choices, and now LumaForge is going up against Avid Nexis and EditShare for high-end business.

In the film industry, we've been waiting on 10GB ethernet to be affordable for a long time. Yes, we could go to fiber, but fiber is expensive and finicky and we're filmmakers, not network engineers, so we mostly run on copper Ethernet networks in our facilities. In the last 2 years, 10GB copper ethernet has taken off, between Apple supporting it with the iMac Pro and the new Mac Pro and the affordable Sonnet T3 adapter, which runs the same hardware as the iMac Pro, so it gets native support from macOS. Of course, now that 10GB is within our grasp, we are all lusting for 100GB ethernet, which is 10 times faster.  And the BFJ supports it, giving us a new thing to long for now that our previous 10GB dreams are coming true.

There are a wide variety of configurations available for the BFJ, along with the original jellyfish, which can be quite confusing as you investigate options and budgets and needs change. To simplify the process and save the need for dozens of emails back and forth and conference calls, LumaForge has designed the Jellyfish Builder, an online tool for configuring what you are looking for as quickly as possible.

Tech Specs

• 600TB, 720TB, & 840TB Configurations
• Integrated 30TB Flash Pool
• Supports 1 / 2.5 / 5 / 10 / 25 / 40 / 50 / 100 GbE
• Supports Ethernet and Ethernet over Fiber
• Includes Mellanox TOR Switch
• 1 Terabyte of DDR4 ECC RAM
• RAID 60
• 28 Cores of Intel Xeon, with the Intel Optane ingest Capacitor

No word yet on pricing or availability, but check out the LumaForge BFJ site to learn more.