Outbound-Only Telemetry0 Inbound PortsZero Client Media Bin Access
SESSION-CONTINUITY & CHARGEBACK OBSERVABILITY

Storage Observability Engineered for Commercial Edit Suites

Protect $800–$1,000/hr finishing sessions from dropped frames, eliminate uncoordinated scrub slowdowns, and invoice client storage holdings across Linux, TrueNAS, and Unraid.

Agent v1.4.2Sub-35MB RAM<0.5% CPUZero Inbound PortsRead-Only Agent

Native Support for Creative Storage Arrays & White-Box Hardware

45Drives Houston / StorinatorTrueNAS SCALE & COREOpenZFS & Linux MDRAIDUnraid & Debian Server
INTERACTIVE COMMAND CENTER PREVIEW

See Exactly What Happens When an Edit Bay Stutters

Switch between real-time post scenarios below. Click into our live sandbox to evaluate live metrics with zero login.

Pillar Fleet Control
CRITICAL ALERT

Drop-Frame Latency Monitor

Isolates single 148ms p99 tail latency outlier during 24fps/60fps playback

Test In Live Sandbox
Suite A Stutter DetectedTarget Budget: 41.7ms (24fps)
Drive 6 (/dev/sde): 148.2ms p99 Outlier

While total pool throughput is healthy at 840 MB/s, Drive 6 in VDEV 2 is pinned in an internal ECC sector retry loop. Exonerates client Thunderbolt docks and 10GbE network switches in 15 seconds.

Drive Queue Await Comparison (41.7ms 24fps Deadline)
/dev/sdc (Edit Pool VDEV 1)3.8ms await (Nominal)
/dev/sdd (Edit Pool VDEV 1)4.1ms await (Nominal)
/dev/sde (Edit Pool VDEV 2)OUTLIER148.2ms await (3.5x over frame budget)
↳ Safe Zone: < 25ms24fps Budget: 41.7msCritical Stall: > 100ms
Simulate real drive degradation, scrub window shifts, and chargeback exports:
Explore Full Interactive Sandbox
FACILITY VULNERABILITIES

The 3 Fatal Weaknesses of Creative NAS Arrays

Standard NAS alerts fire when a drive is already dead. In commercial post-production, silent degradation during active client review passes ruins deliverables.

Silent Sector Decay & Parity Crashes

Enterprise drives accumulate uncorrectable read errors (UREs) and bad sectors over weeks. Too often, the first time a controller flags them is during a grueling rebuild—when a secondary drive drops offline and corrupts the entire pool.

Machine Room Thermal Creep & Platter Wear

Server rack ambient temperatures surge when finishing suites kick off overnight render queues. Generic monitoring tools either wake sleeping platters 50+ times a day or miss nocturnal 50°C+ heat spikes completely—accelerating drive degradation.

Uncoordinated Scrubs & Dropped Frames

There is zero tolerance for I/O stalls hours before master delivery. When an uncoordinated ZFS scrub or drive resilver cuts pool read throughput by 60% during a live 4K client review, playback stutters and edit bays freeze with zero warning.

THE SESSION-CONTINUITY ENGINE

Four Pillars Engineered for Post-Production Storage

Eliminate finger-pointing between editors, network engineers, and storage leads when playback stutters during client reviews.

24fps Budget: 41.7ms

Edit Suite Drop-Frame & Latency Attribution

When 4K ProRes playback stutters, editors immediately blame the storage array. Pillar measures kernel block-layer await times and isolates the critical p99 tail latency. Within 15 seconds, you know whether a single disk is choking on sector retries (140ms await) or if the SAN is clean—exonerating 10GbE network switches and client Thunderbolt docks.

Telemetry: /proc/diskstatsZero-Root Sampling
Scrub Conflict Engine

Predictive Scrub Windowing: Morning Session Conflict Alerts

Automated scrubs consume up to 70% of array read bandwidth. Naive linear ETAs fool engineers into assuming an overnight scrub will finish before 9:00 AM client reviews. Pillar models variable scrub velocity to forecast maintenance collisions with active edit hours—giving your team hours of advance notice to throttle or pause parity checks before sessions begin.

Schedule: Active Edit HoursPredictive Intelligence
CoW 80% Allocation Cliff

Ingest Velocity & 80% ZFS Degradation Forecasts

Post-production ingest is notoriously lumpy—a 3-day multi-cam shoot can unload 35TB in 48 hours. Copy-on-write filesystems like ZFS suffer severe throughput collapse once pool capacity crosses 80% due to block allocator fragmentation. Pillar models multi-window velocity (24h/7d/30d) to project the exact date your array hits the 80% performance cliff.

Runway: Multi-Window (24h/7d/30d)Tiered Storage Breakdown
Invoicing & Standby Safety

Client Storage Chargeback & Standby Spindown Preservation

Transform facility storage into a profit center by automatically attributing ZFS dataset capacities to client projects for billing ($50–$150/TB/mo). Meanwhile, our low-level collector interrogates drives strictly with -n standby, ensuring nearline cold archive platters never wake up needlessly during polling.

Billing: CSV / Accounting SyncZero Platter Wakeups
ARCHITECTURAL COMPARISON

Generic Monitoring vs. Pillar Fleet Control

Generic IT tools treat post arrays like database clusters. And custom cron scripts wake sleeping platters 50 times a day while remaining blind to block queue stalls.

The “I Can Script This with smartmontools” Trap

Why Custom Python & Bash Scripts Break Down in a Post Facility

Your Custom smartmontools Script:
  • Wakes cold nearline platters every hour, wearing spindle bearings and inflating power draw.
  • Spams Slack/email with raw hex logs whenever an irrelevant attribute fluctuates.
  • Completely blind to real-time block-layer queue depth and 100ms I/O await spikes.
  • Cannot model ZFS copy-on-write 80% allocation collapse cliffs before playback freezes.
Pillar Fleet Control:
  • Invokes -n standby to preserve sleeping disks without waking platters.
  • Surfaces p99 service time spikes against the 41.7ms 24fps client playback deadline.
  • Calculates rolling 30-minute velocity deltas to catch scrub collisions with morning sessions.
  • Predicts exact hour of ZFS metaslab fragmentation collapse with non-disableable safety floors.
Scroll horizontallyPillar Fleet Control
Diagnostic VectorDIY smartctl CronDatadog / PrometheusPillar Fleet Control
Zero-Latency Outlier Isolation (p99 Tail)
Identifies 140ms disk service stalls during 24fps/60fps playback
✕ Blind to I/O queue! Averages mask p99 spikes✓ 15s Outlier Isolation
Platter Spindown & Standby Safety
Preserves low-power sleep on cold archive without waking heads
✕ Polling wakes platters✕ 50+ spin-ups/day✓ -nocheck standby safe
Smart Scrub Windowing Guardrails
Prevents monthly parity checks from choking morning client reviews
✕ Unaware of schedule! Naive linear math✓ Rolling 30m delta warnings
ZFS CoW 80% Degradation Runway
Forecasts performance collapse cliffs before 35TB multi-cam drops
✕ Only alerts at 90% full! Linear disk alert✓ 80% CoW cliff modeling
Facility Security & TPN Footprint
Auditor-approved read-only container with zero footage bin mounts
! Needs root shell cron✕ Heavy ~250MB daemon✓ Read-Only Root / Port 443
ZERO-TRUST FACILITY ISOLATION

“Don't Touch My Footage Until I Know What It Does”

Auditor-approved read-only container architecture designed to pass MPA & Trusted Partner Network (TPN) zero-trust security audits without touching project media bins.

Data Flow & Isolation Architecture
01. Studio Storage Host
TrueNAS / ZFS / Linux
/proc/diskstats :ro
/sys/block :ro
/mnt/tank (ZERO ACCESS)
Outbound Only (Port 443)
Encrypted Telemetry Push
0 Inbound Ports
Zero Listening Sockets
HTTPS Metric Heartbeat
02. Pillar Control Plane
Real-Time Fleet Dashboard
p99 Frame Spikes
Scrub Window Alerts
80% Ingest Forecasts
🛡️ZERO FOOTAGE ACCESS

Security & Telemetry Inspector

Target Platform:
# Non-root, capability-stripped container command. Zero media dataset paths mounted.
docker run -d --name pillar-agent \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --read-only \
  --cap-drop=ALL \
  --cap-add=SYS_RAWIO \
  --tmpfs /tmp:rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=64m \
  -v /dev:/dev:ro \
  -v /proc/diskstats:/proc/diskstats:ro \
  -v /sys/block:/sys/block:ro \
  -v /sys/class/block:/sys/class/block:ro \
  -v /sys/class/enclosure:/sys/class/enclosure:ro \
  -v pillar-agent-data:/etc/pillar \
  -e PILLAR_API_KEY=<YOUR_STUDIO_API_KEY> \
  ghcr.io/pillarinteractive/pillar-agent:latest
✓ Read-Only RootSub-35MB RAM0 Inbound PortsZero Media Traversal
STORAGE CONTINUITY & CHARGEBACK PRICING

Transparent Pricing. Unlimited Terabytes on Every Tier.

In post-production, expanding from 100TB to 300TB happens because of 6K/8K RAW ingest—not because your team tripled. Zero per-terabyte penalties. Zero per-drive fees. Zero surprise metric overages.

Founding Cohort 1: Strictly Limited to 10 FacilitiesEditorial ROI: $800–$1,000/hr Finishing Session Insurance

Lock In the Founding Rate: $299/mo for Life ($2,990/yr)

Full predictive telemetry and client storage chargeback suite with 14 days zero-risk evaluation ($0 upfront, zero credit card). Includes direct 1-on-1 Slack onboarding with Mark (Founder) for host pairing and scrub tuning. Client storage invoicing ($50–$150/TB/mo) makes Pillar an immediate net-positive revenue center.

Claim Founding Seat ($299/mo)$299/mo lifetime rate lock • 14 Days Free
Monthly BillingAnnual Billing2 Months Free (~17% Off)
Recommended for Commercial Facilities

Studio Fleet

For multi-suite post houses & boutique finishing facilities

All Features Included
$349/ mo

Billed monthly • Up to 3 storage heads included

Founding Cohort Rate:$299/mo lifetime lock
Unlimited Terabytes & Disks (Zero capacity penalties)
Up to 3 Storage Appliances (Heads/Nodes)
Drop-Frame Latency Attribution (41.7ms 24fps budget)
Smart Scrub & Resilver Windowing (Morning session conflict alerts)
80% CoW Runway & Capacity Velocity (ZFS cliff modeling)
Project Chargeback & Client Invoicing Module
Cold Platter Spindown Preservation (-n standby safe)
90-Day Telemetry Retention & Diurnal Thermals
Slack, Discord & Transactional Email Alerts
Up to 10 team member seats

Facility Enterprise

For high-throughput facilities, broadcast groups & studio campuses

High-Scale Fleet
$799/ mo

Billed monthly • Up to 10 storage heads included

EVERYTHING IN STUDIO FLEET, PLUS:
Up to 10 Storage Appliances Included (Expandable)
Unlimited Terabytes & Disks
1-Year Telemetry Compliance Data Lake
TPN / MPA Auditor-Ready PDF Security Briefs
Priority Founder Engineering Onboarding & Architecture Review
Dedicated Direct Slack Integrator Channel
Unlimited team member seats
Custom multi-pool and cross-chassis alert routing
HARDWARE SCALING INVARIANT

Need to monitor more than 3 or 10 storage appliances?

Scale to any number of TrueNAS, Unraid, or 45Drives heads across your facility for just +$99/month per additional host. Your terabytes and disks remain completely unlimited on every tier.

+$99/ host / month
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Quickstart Technical FAQ

Does Pillar support SAS controllers and JBOD expansion chassis?

Yes. Pillar natively supports direct SATA, SAS, and NVMe block devices across LSI, Broadcom, and Microsemi Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) flashed to IT mode (Initiator Target). In JBOD topographies, our collector tracks both physical enclosure slots and OS device identifiers (/dev/sd*, /dev/nvme*n*).

How do I deploy Pillar on TrueNAS SCALE or Unraid?

Pillar is packaged as a standard, multi-architecture OCI Docker container image. On TrueNAS SCALE, deploy it via the “Custom App” interface with read-only host path volume mounts for /proc/diskstats and /sys/block. On Unraid, paste the 1-line Docker command into the web terminal or use the Unraid Community Apps container template. For step-by-step guides, systemd unit files, and persistent init scripts, see our Platform Deployment Guides.

How do I cleanly uninstall the agent if we decide not to proceed?

Complete uninstallation takes 5 seconds: run docker stop pillar-agent && docker rm pillar-agent. Because Pillar runs inside a strictly read-only container without host root filesystem hooks or cron modifications, zero residual files or background daemons remain on your server. See Troubleshooting & Lifecycle for de-provisioning details.

Why don't you bill by terabytes like cloud monitoring vendors?

In post-production, a single 3-day multi-cam commercial shoot can generate 35TB of camera RAW footage. Charging by the terabyte penalizes facilities for doing their work and creates unpredictability. We charge exclusively by the number of monitored storage appliances and team capabilities—your terabytes are always unlimited.

Can Pillar execute commands or modify my active storage pools?

No. Pillar is engineered strictly as a non-interfering observability engine. The container runs with --read-only, dropped capabilities (--cap-drop=ALL), and strictly read-only volume bindings. Pillar will never issue an unsolicited write command, kill an active process, pause a scrub autonomously, or touch your pool configuration. Your storage administrators remain 100% in control. Read our Security & Network Whitepaper for complete container audit specifications.

Deploy on Your Secondary or Ingest Array in Under 60 Seconds

Eliminate dropped frames in client reviews and uncoordinated rebuilds. Start your 14-day free pilot with zero credit card required.