Small Tree's Customer Service and Shared Storage System Performance Leave Lasting Impression on Artsis Media

It is every small business owner's worst nightmare - not meeting your customer's expectations and then losing that customer as a result. For Artsis Media, the nightmare almost became a reality as the full-service production company was crippled with a crashing editing system that nearly prevented the completion of a critical project.

Unfortunately for Michael Artsis, founder and owner of Artsis Media, system difficulties are nothing new. In fact, his latest series of system failures fell on the heels of having to come up with a solution to finish a video project for the Darryl Strawberry Foundation; having recently completed a rough cut of the video, Artsis' hard drive crashed when he went to render the video. In light of this unfortunate development, Artsis turned to four Drobo drives as a band-aid to complete the project in time.

While the editing team was able to finish its work, Artsis soon found out that they couldn't rely on Drobo as a workflow alternative for long. Even more infuriating to Artsis was that he couldn't rely on Drobo customer service when he needed them most. Luckily for Artsis, Small Tree's friendly and professional expert staff was only a phone call away.

"We were working on a time-sensitive project for our largest customer when the Drobo stopped working," Artsis said. "Drobo's customer service recommended we buy a new server, which we did, but the Drobo still didn't work and it was obvious that they weren't in any hurry to help us with a solution. Fearing we would miss our client's deadline and lose their business, I searched for an alternative and was fortunate to find Small Tree thanks to the folks at AbelCine."

Small Tree listened to Artsis, found out what the issue was, gathered details on the company's specific editing set up - four editing bays, including two iMacs and two laptops - and recommended an alternative that would meet his workload and budgetary requirements. Within days, Artsis had Small Tree's 24TB GraniteSTOR ST-RAID Ethernet-based shared storage system up and running at his facility and he was able to meet his customer's deadline. With the robust ST-RAID, the Artsis Media editing team was even able to begin working on other projects, simultaneously, that had been backing up as a result of the previous difficulties they were having with their system.

While Artsis has been thrilled with the ST-RAID's impact on his team's workflow and the scalability of the system is attractive for the company's future growth, it is Small Tree's unparalleled customer service that has separated them from everyone else.

"When initially looking for storage technology after the failure of the Drobo, we first called another company and we couldn't get them on the phone," Artsis remarked. "So we were amazed when Small Tree spent time to work with us remotely to set up the system to achieve optimal performance. There is no company that I have dealt with in the last five years that has customer service comparable to Small Tree."

The GraniteSTOR ST-RAID system, which includes a PE2G6I (6 port GbE adapter), enabling the Artsis Media server to feed 1 Gb of video editing bandwidth to each editing bay. Given this, Artsis Media editors are far more productive and meeting project deadlines is a thing of the past.

Designer of simple-to-install, affordable Mac-based networking and shared storage products, Small Tree is the premier multi-port Ethernet networking technology provider for OS X customers, enabling cost effective Ethernet shared storage technology. For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.