Technology has its trends, just like fashion — it’s arguably the industry that is most plagued by buzzwords. Virtualization! The Cloud! Zero Client! To consumers these all sound super interesting, but anyone in the industry knows that “the cloud” just means your information is on someone else’s computer. Don’t get me wrong, these technologies were game changing, but manufacturers and vendors have a way of making you sick of hearing about them and over-embellishing their use case.
Apple had us fooled the longest. Creative markets especially love to be on top of whatever is hip at the time and Apple spent the early 2000s convincing us all that it was the technology equivalent of Ryan Gosling (Hey girl, whatchu know about sleek hardware design?). In their defense, for a while it was true. The film industry’s obsession with Final Cut let Apple dominate everything outside of the Avid market for the better part of a decade. Their flashy aluminum hardware made server racks look cool and the G5 and Mac Pro towers the same for anyone’s workspace. At the time there was no reason to complain, the hardware was decent and for the most part it just worked. From an IT standpoint managing Apple hardware and software was fairly simple. Then it was over almost as soon as it began. Apple abandoned their enterprise platforms in exchange for handheld devices; their server platforms discontinued and OSX server became an afterthought. Through all this however the cheese grater Mac Pro lives on to this day, and for good reason. It’s the only true “pro” Macintosh workstation, and for those that don’t want to clutter their workspace with seemingly endless thunderbolt devices it’s the only way to go. People still pay a pretty penny for modified units that can accept current hardware (can I get that with a 1080 please?).
The longevity of Final Cut and Apple workstations, with the lack of Apple branded storage, opened the floodgates for proprietary storage vendors to move in on the film industry. Once Apple dropped the ball with Final Cut X and Adobe moved in on the market with Premiere as the “next big thing” this market continued to expand. There’s now almost countless storage vendors offering ZFS or proprietary filesystem solutions for use with your choice of editing software. Everyone has their say on what they think is best, but we can all agree that at the end of the day you’re paying an extremely high cost per terabyte for a system that requires a lot of manhours in maintenance and upkeep. On top of that, maintaining a Mac environment is costly in itself. Almost everything is an additional cost: You want AD managed GPOs? Better put up the money for Centrtify. Single Sign-On? Okta or OneLogin to the rescue. 10G connectivity? On top of that PCI card you need to put up some serious cash for a PCI thunderbolt chassis (if you aren’t desperately clinging to the cheese grater).
Now this isn’t to say that Apple doesn’t have its place in the workplace. In fact that’s far from the case. As an IT professional I prefer a Mac hands down. Being a former DevOps engineer UNIX runs through my veins and Terminal is by far the best native CLI. I can run Windows either natively or as a VM to have instant access to either OS. Simply put it makes my job easier (and yes their hardware still looks great. Except for the Trashcan. Screw the trashcan). However, considering the future of our infrastructure, we here at our agency took all of this into consideration and we found ourselves asking one question: why? There surely had to be a better way. We weren’t alone in hearing the quiet whispers of “Windows…. Windows…”. After all, Windows 10 is a solid operating system. Their server platform is by far superior to any other options, you’d be hard pressed to find an organization that’s not using a Windows domain controller. Microsoft adds new features to Office365 and Azure daily. SSO is free up to a certain point using Azure AD, therefore, why put up that extra money for a 3rd party service? Now you may say “OK sure, but basic enterprise services aside, what else are they good for? Windows file sharing isn’t nearly capable enough to handle production workflows”. Well, that’s where we are now all wrong. Windows Server 2016 brings in the big guns. SMB Direct (RDMA) stands up against NFS in a head-to-head matchup. Server 2016’s new S2D (Storage Spaces Direct) platform utilizes NVMe caching just as well as ZFS, and they’re now introducing a RAM caching mechanism using Storage Class Memory that will be 10 times faster than that. Storage is object-based, no more waiting 40 hours for a RAID to rebuild. The load-balancing capabilities are best-in-class, superior high-availability, and the great part about all of this is that you can choose your own hardware. Head nodes, JBODs, hard-drives: pick and choose as you want! And because you’re running windows you’re not putting up $200,000 for three years of software licensing. Do the math. Not only do you save a massive amount in cost-per-terbyte, but you can get three top tier Windows workstations for the cost of a single Mac when all is said and done. Overall we’ve ended up spending around a third (and that’s being conservative) of what we would have spent to update our storage to something like a new Open Drives or Qumulo system as well as update all our Mac workstations. Companies like Qumulo offer an exceptional product, but is the additional cost really worth what they’re offering at the end of the day?
Best of all, it works. There’s no arguing that Windows Server is extremely easy to manage and exceptionally stable. Permissions are a breeze, there’s enumerated file access, plus you can just as easily manage everything from the GUI as you can from the CLI. At the end of the day it makes our jobs easier and works just as well (and in many cases better) than the competition. The initial reactions to our decision to become almost entirely a Microsoft shop were skeptical. We must be crazy! However, if you take the time to evaluate everything Microsoft now has to offer and everything they plan to offer in the years to come you’ll see that they’re bringing high performance, supreme reliability, and ease of management at an extremely low cost. In our opinion, the future of studio tech is Microsoft.