Outbound-Only TelemetryNo TCP/UDP listeners by designNo production dataset mounts
BUILT FOR COMMERCIAL POST-PRODUCTION

Keep Client Review Sessions Running Before Storage Stalls Cost the Day

Pillar gives post facilities early warning of storage latency, scrub conflicts, and capacity risk across Linux, TrueNAS, and Unraid.

Agent 2.1Read-only filesystemOutbound telemetryNo TCP/UDP listeners by designRead-Only Agent

Native Support for Creative Storage Arrays & White-Box Hardware

45Drives Houston / StorinatorTrueNAS SCALE & COREOpenZFS & Linux MDRAIDUnraid & Debian Server
ONE INCIDENT, ONE CLEAR ANSWER

See Which Layer Is Causing the Stutter

In this example, Pillar identifies a 148ms disk outlier while showing pool capacity normal and no host-side interface saturation or packet loss observed.

Pillar
CRITICAL ALERT

Drop-Frame Latency Monitor

Isolates single 148ms mean read await outlier during 24fps/60fps playback

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

While total pool throughput remains normal at 840 MB/s, Drive 6 in VDEV 2 is pinned in an internal ECC sector retry loop. Host NIC drops normal; no host-side interface saturation or packet loss observed—isolated 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

Three Risks That Can Interrupt a Client Session

Standard alerts often arrive after a failure. Pillar is built to surface the early signals that matter during active work.

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

I/O stalls close to master delivery can be costly. An uncoordinated ZFS scrub or drive resilver may compete for pool resources during a live review; Pillar helps teams spot and coordinate those maintenance conditions.

THE SESSION-CONTINUITY ENGINE

The Signals Your Team Needs Before a Session Is Affected

Pinpoint the cause, protect maintenance windows, plan capacity, and account for storage without adding another dashboard of noise.

24fps Budget: 41.7ms

Edit Suite Drop-Frame & Latency Attribution

See whether a playback stall is caused by a single disk, the storage pool, or something outside the array—before teams lose time chasing the wrong layer.

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

Predictive Scrub Windowing: Morning Session Conflict Alerts

Compare scrub progress with scheduled edit hours so your team can adjust maintenance before it overlaps a client session.

Schedule: Active Edit HoursPredictive Intelligence
CoW 80% Allocation Cliff

Ingest Velocity & 80% ZFS Degradation Forecasts

Track recent ingest velocity and capacity runway so teams can make room before an incoming project creates performance risk.

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

Client Storage Chargeback & Standby Spindown Preservation

Attribute storage to client projects while polling drive health in a way that preserves standby disks.

Billing: CSV / Accounting SyncStandby-aware health checks
ARCHITECTURAL COMPARISON

Generic Monitoring vs. Pillar

The difference is context: Pillar relates storage health to active edit sessions, maintenance windows, and capacity plans.

Where point monitoring stops short

Why Session Context Matters

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:
  • Invokes -n standby to preserve sleeping disks without waking platters.
  • Surfaces tail-latency spikes—true p99 with Pillar Observer, mean read await with Agent alone—against the 41.7ms 24fps client playback deadline.
  • Calculates rolling 30-minute velocity deltas to catch scrub collisions with morning sessions.
  • Forecasts capacity runway from recent ingest patterns and configurable safety thresholds.

Find the bottleneck

Tell a single-drive outlier apart from pool-wide or host-NIC problems.

Protect edit hours

Spot scrub conflicts before they overlap a scheduled session.

Plan capacity

Use recent ingest velocity to see when a pool needs attention.

ZERO-TRUST FACILITY ISOLATION

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

Built with read-only, outbound-only telemetry controls to support facility security reviews. Validate the deployment against your organization's specific TPN and MPA requirements.

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
No TCP/UDP listeners by design
No inbound port-forward configuration required
HTTPS Metric Heartbeat
02. Pillar Cloud
Real-Time Fleet Dashboard
Tail Frame Spikes (p99 w/ Observer)
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@sha256:<verified-release-digest>
✓ Read-Only RootSub-35MB RAMNo TCP/UDP listeners by designNo production dataset mounts in documented configuration
STORAGE CONTINUITY & CHARGEBACK PRICING

Transparent, appliance-based pricing.

In post-production, capacity can grow quickly with 6K/8K RAW ingest. The plans shown do not meter usage by terabyte. Plan limits, availability, and the applicable Order Form apply.

Founding offer: subject to availability and eligibility

Founding monthly rate: $299/mo

Evaluation eligibility, pricing, and included services are confirmed at signup. The founding plan includes the features and onboarding scope described in the applicable Order Form.

Claim Founding Seat ($299/mo)$299/mo at current founding-offer pricing
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 offer pricing:$299/mo or $2,990/year
Studio Fleet includes up to 3 storage heads, capacity visibility, and team alerts
  • • Storage-side latency indicators and scrub-window alerts
  • • Capacity runway, chargeback, and cold-disk-safe monitoring
  • • 90-day telemetry retention and up to 10 team 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 10 storage heads and 1-year retention
  • • Security brief and architecture review to support facility assessments
  • • Dedicated integration support and plan-specified team seats
  • • Custom multi-pool and cross-chassis alert routing
HARDWARE SCALING INVARIANT

Need to monitor more than 3 or 10 storage appliances?

Additional monitored storage heads may be available at +$99/month per host, subject to the selected plan and Order Form. Capacity usage is not separately metered by terabyte on the plans shown.

+$99/ host / month

Prices, plan availability, included services, and renewal terms are subject to the applicable Order Form and Terms of Service.

Need SSO (SAML/OIDC)? Available on custom plans — contact us.

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?

Stopping and removing the agent container ends monitoring: docker stop pillar-agent && docker rm pillar-agent. A complete removal may also require removing the signed updater, its systemd timer, configuration, and named volumes. See Troubleshooting & Lifecycle for de-provisioning details.

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

Pillar pricing is based on the selected plan and monitored storage appliances rather than measured terabyte consumption. Capacity usage is not separately metered on the plans shown here; plan limits and the applicable Order Form still apply.

Can Pillar execute commands or modify my active storage pools?

Pillar can perform only explicitly authorized, allowlisted actions, such as pausing or resuming an active scrub and controlling a verified enclosure LED. It does not autonomously change pool configuration, kill processes, or issue arbitrary commands. The deployment uses a read-only filesystem and dropped capabilities; administrators should review the documented deployment controls for their environment. Read our Security & Network Whitepaper for details.

See What Pillar Finds Before You Put It on a Production Array

Start on a secondary or ingest array, validate the signals with your team, then decide whether to expand. Evaluation eligibility and checkout requirements are shown at signup.