OpenDrives: Moving Beyond High Performance to Effortless Collaboration
Why today's creative teams are switching from OpenDrives to creative.space for simpler workflows, proactive management, and seamless collaboration.
OpenDrives vs. creative.space: Moving Beyond High Performance to Effortless Collaboration
Creative teams live at the intersection of art and technology. As projects scale, teams inevitably face the question: can our storage infrastructure keep pace? While high-performance solutions like OpenDrives have set a high bar for speed and reliability in the past, today’s creative teams require more than raw power. They need storage that simplifies their lives, freeing them from managing infrastructure so they can focus purely on their craft.
Understanding the OpenDrives Approach
Since 2011, OpenDrives has delivered enterprise-grade performance through its proprietary Atlas software platform. Born out of Hollywood’s demanding post-production workflows, OpenDrives excels at squeezing impressive performance from specialized hardware. For years, this made them an appealing choice for studios dealing with intensive, high-bandwidth workflows and tight deadlines.
Atlas delivers robust features like snapshots, multi-protocol support (SMB, NFS, S3), optimized caching, and hybrid cloud integration. OpenDrives has been particularly successful serving high-profile clients across film, broadcast, and visual effects industries.
However, many creative teams have discovered that proprietary performance solutions also come with inherent complexities—both technical and financial. Customers who adopted these systems for their initial gains sometimes found themselves locked into expensive support agreements, or reliant on specialized knowledge just to maintain everyday workflows.
The New Era: Beyond Raw Performance
Today, off-the-shelf hardware has significantly advanced, narrowing the performance gap that once justified proprietary storage systems. As hardware standardization improves, creative teams increasingly value simplicity, proactive support, and seamless collaboration above sheer speed alone.
Recognizing this shift, creative.space—a two-time NAB Product of the Year winner—was built specifically to serve modern, non-technical video teams. While also leveraging ZFS, creative.space didn’t stop at high performance; it transformed the entire storage experience into something simpler and more intuitive.
Simplifying the Creative Workflow
Unlike traditional enterprise storage, creative.space emphasizes effortless collaboration. Every file becomes instantly accessible through simple, shareable links. Editors never have to download or relink footage again—files automatically open in their preferred editing software, from Premiere Pro to DaVinci Resolve. This innovation eliminates the complexities associated with typical cloud solutions and traditional NAS systems.
Moreover, creative.space is fully managed. Proactive monitoring, routine maintenance, and instant support mean teams no longer have to troubleshoot storage issues or worry about downtime.
Why Teams are Switching to creative.space
When renowned production teams like The Belonging Co., Real by Fake, and Milwaukee Tools faced challenges with their existing OpenDrives solutions, they turned to creative.space—not because OpenDrives couldn’t deliver performance, but because they wanted something more.
Daniel Bender, Director at The Belonging Co., shared his experience: “Previously, after major events, we’d spend countless hours troubleshooting our storage. Once we switched to creative.space, storage became invisible. Now we focus purely on storytelling, not technical hurdles.”
Protecting Your Investment
For existing OpenDrives customers, creative.space provides an elegant path forward. Without discarding your current hardware, you can seamlessly upgrade your existing systems to run the creative.space OS. This preserves your original investment, frees you from restrictive support agreements, and enables affordable, scalable expansion.
Since both platforms are built on the open source OpenZFS architecture, migrating is as easy as importing the drive pool. This smooth transition ensures teams avoid disruptions while benefiting immediately from simplified workflows and proactive management.
The Invisible Advantage
The true power of creative.space isn’t merely in its impressive performance—it’s the freedom it provides. Storage stops being a daily concern and transforms into an invisible foundation supporting effortless creativity. This shift redefines how creative teams operate, collaborate, and thrive.
In short, creative.space isn’t simply about faster hardware or smarter software. It’s about an entirely new relationship with storage—one where the best technology disappears, leaving only creativity and collaboration behind.
Because the most effective storage solution is one that teams never have to think about at all.
