Facilis, OpenDrives, and the enterprise media-storage old guard in 2026

The high-end shared-storage old guard is not dead, and pretending otherwise is the fastest way to give a busy facility bad advice. Facilis and OpenDrives both still ship product, still sell at NAB, and still win deals in 2026 that no SaaS suite or self-hosted NAS would survive. The interesting question is not whether they are obsolete. It is who still writes the check, and why, when the alternatives are cheaper and louder than ever.

Who the old guard actually is #

Both companies grew out of the same era and the same problem: Fibre Channel SANs and direct-attached RAID could not let a room full of editors touch the same uncompressed footage without tripping over each other. Facilis Technology was founded in 2003 in Hudson, Massachusetts by Francis Albert, an Avid alumnus, and its TerraBlock line became a fixture in broadcast and post houses. In 2019 Facilis retired the TerraBlock name for new hardware and rebranded the line as HUB, though you will still hear "TerraBlock" on facility floors the way people still say Kleenex. The company says its gear is installed in more than 3,000 facilities worldwide (Facilis company materials, checked Jun 2026).

OpenDrives came later and from the other coast. It was founded in 2011 in the Los Angeles area by a crew of working Hollywood editors, colorists, and data engineers who needed somewhere to put 4K and 8K masters that were getting too big to move around. Its client list reads like a studio marquee: Disney, Warner Bros., HBO, NBCUniversal, and Paramount have all shown up in its case studies. In January 2021 it raised up to $20 million in Series B funding led by IAG Capital Partners, bringing total capital raised to about $30 million (GlobeNewswire and FinSMEs, Jan 2021). That venture money matters to the story, and I will come back to it.

The short version: Facilis is the bootstrapped New England hardware shop that has quietly outlasted nearly everyone, and OpenDrives is the venture-backed Hollywood-native that bet on software-defined storage. Two different temperaments, one shared customer.

What you actually get in 2026 #

This is real shared storage, not a sync folder with a marketing budget. A Facilis HUB or FLASHPoint chassis is a turnkey appliance with its own file system, the Facilis Shared File System, that lets multiple editors hold write permissions on one volume at the same time. OpenDrives Atlas is software-defined: the same platform runs on all-HDD, all-flash, or hybrid hardware, and in version 2.11 it added support for certified Dell PowerEdge configurations alongside its own boxes (OpenDrives and StorageNewsletter, NAB 2026, checked Jun 2026). The analogy I use for a less-technical client is that these are the building's plumbing, sized and pressure-tested for the whole floor, not a garden hose you screw onto one workstation.

The throughput numbers are the point. Here is where the two lines sit, with the published figures.

Two honest notes on that table. Facilis publishes a clean model ladder with throughput per chassis, which I respect; OpenDrives publishes capability language but no public GB/sec or IOPS figure on its Atlas page, so I am not going to invent one. And the only public price either company offers is the OpenDrives Corporate Creative starting bundle "under $50,000," which explicitly excludes hardware and installation (OpenDrives, Nov 2025). For everything else, you are getting a quote.

The 2026 features actually tell you who they fear #

Watch what a mature vendor ships and you learn what its customers are nervous about. At NAB Show 2026 both companies leaned hard into two themes: remote access and enterprise security. Facilis HUB 8.4 added Multi-link technology that detects and combines client network paths for up to double the speed of a single Ethernet link, plus OAuth and single sign-on against Entra ID, Okta, and Ping, and a "Lock Down" mode that cuts off unauthorized access at both server and client (Facilis press release via StorageNewsletter, Apr 2026). FastCache, its NVMe client-side caching layer, keeps a local copy of working media on a workstation SSD whether the editor is on LAN, VPN, or WAN, with permissions still enforced and the cache stored as an obscured data set that only mounts when connected.

If that local-cache-plus-permissions pattern sounds familiar, it should. It is the same architecture that makes a remote editor feel local, and it is the heart of what I built JuiceMount around. The old guard arrived at the same answer from the opposite direction: they bolted caching onto a private, on-prem file system instead of starting from a self-hosted mount. The convergence is the tell. OpenDrives made the same move with OpenDrives Edge, unveiled at NAB 2026 as a hybrid cloud-edge accelerator that pulls data once, caches it locally at LAN speed, syncs changes back, and is explicitly pitched at killing cloud egress fees (OpenDrives, Apr 2026). When two veteran storage vendors both ship "work local, sync later, watch the egress" in the same month, the market has spoken about where the pain is.

Who still buys them, and why it is rational #

Here is the part the cheaper crowd gets wrong. Buying Facilis or OpenDrives in 2026 is not nostalgia. For a specific kind of shop it is the correct call, and I would tell a client so even though it competes with what I make.

The buyer is usually a facility with a room full of editors hammering one volume at once, a deadline culture where downtime is measured in billable hours, and either a broadcast operation or a studio-adjacent pipeline with contractual security requirements. They are buying three things money can usually only rent: a single throat to choke when a controller fails at 2 a.m., a file system tuned for concurrent uncompressed playback rather than general office use, and an audit trail that a studio security questionnaire will actually accept. Facilis FastTracker MAM and the new Lock Down mode exist precisely because that buyer's clients now send NDAs and chain-of-custody requirements before footage ships. A consumer NAS or a sync tool does not pass that review, and a SaaS suite means handing the footage to someone else's cloud.

That said, I will name where it does not fit. If you are a two-to-five-person post team, a quote-only Fibre Channel or all-flash appliance is almost certainly more storage, more support contract, and more capital outlay than your workflow justifies. If you mostly edit proxies and need remote access more than raw concurrent bandwidth, the old guard's strengths are wasted on you. And the venture-backed model carries its own quiet risk: OpenDrives took roughly $30 million in outside capital, and venture-funded storage companies live or die by the next round or the acquisition, which is worth weighing if you want a vendor that will still answer the phone in a decade. Facilis being bootstrapped and 20-plus years old is, ironically, the conservative pick. I cover that ownership-and-exit calculus in more depth in open source vs SaaS for creative infrastructure.

Where they sit in the longer story #

Facilis and OpenDrives are the survivors of a generation. The bigger names of that era are cautionary tales worth knowing before you sign: the long, strange arc of Avid shared storage from ISIS to Nexis and the decades of consolidation behind EditShare show how fragile even a category leader can be. The whole industry swung from on-prem SAN to cloud and is now swinging back, a pendulum I trace in why on-prem storage is having a moment again. The old guard is benefiting from that swing without having changed its core thesis: keep the bytes in the building, make them fast, and put a support contract behind them.

My honest read in 2026 is that Facilis and OpenDrives are not the past. They are the high, expensive ceiling of a market whose floor has dropped out from under them. The capability they sell (a real shared file system, local cache, enterprise auth, on-prem control) is now reachable with open-source tooling on commodity hardware for a fraction of the per-seat cost. JuiceMount lives at that floor: a $0-per-seat mount that turns a self-hosted NAS into a real Finder volume with block-level streaming, a local SSD cache, and a local search index. It does not come with a 2 a.m. support contract or a studio-grade audit pedigree, and for a 50-editor broadcast plant that contract is the product. For everyone the old guard prices out, the architecture they pioneered is finally affordable.