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what I observe (on SAN systems)
This is my stupid observation.
As I have written several articles on inexpensive shared storage systems, I have received many phone calls and emails on this.
It is my observation that the #1 priority is cost, and that no matter how inexpensive these systems appear to me, they are all still too expensive.The very fact that a $2800 “server” computer is required to run a shared storage system is the “brick” that prevents most people from getting into shared storage. People want a $1500 turnkey shared storage solution (like modern low speed NAS solutions), and this simply does not exist for the professional video market. No matter what you tell people, about how they can reuse their existing storage, how they can do “this and that” to save money” – the very fact that they have to spend $5000 to just get started is just too much money for most people.
I post this as a “slap in the face” to the manufacturers that read this forum, thinking that their $25,000 solution is a “great value” compared to Apple XSAN. The reality that I am starting to realize is that most users want to spend “nothing”, and that even $5000 is not “nothing” to most people.
I started to think about this when I went to a local auto body shop to get an estimate for a tiny “ding” on my car’s bumper. It was $425 plus tax. Most people on these forums simply can’t afford to spend this amount of money to fix a ding on their bumpers, and certainly can’t afford $5000 + for a shared storage system.
Bob Zelin
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7 Replies
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I agree with Bob.
But I can add that a little over a year ago I was one of those people who looked for and couldn’t find a $5000 solution….at least not one that I felt was robust or dependable enough over the long haul. We ended up spending about $15,000 for a NAS system (Apace vStor), backup drives, shared project storage drives, a new switch, new cabling, racks and installation…and I can honestly say it was the best investment we’ve made in the 13 year life of our company. Our first NLE system cost us almost $100,000 in 1996 and had a whopping 50GB of video storage, a 640MB system drive, and a 2GB audio/graphics drive.
So to us, getting 4TB of shared video storage that actually works 24/7, a 4TB network backup drive, a 2TB project network drive and all the other stuff listed above seemed like a bargain. The productivity gains alone are likely worth the 15k. We haven’t had a second of down-time in the 13 months we’ve had this system. The only problem I’ve had is I couldn’t find the power switch (it’s tiny) on the vStor one day after a power outage. It’s run non-stop and without issue since the day it was installed. After that first power outage, it’s now set to turn itself back on after an outage, which it does dutifully.
In the previous year, I can guarantee we had at least 5-7 full days or more of downtime due to corruption and/or hardware issues with our direct attached SCSI drives. Not to mention many harried days and nights of praying a flaky drive didn’t go bad on us during big projects, and hours and hours on the phone with tech support people that knew less than I did about drive arrays (scary since I’m no expert)…and hours and hours running their silly diagnostic steps even though I’d already stepped through them all before I ever called.
Backups all go to one big drive now and run every night. We literally spend about 30 seconds each morning just checking to see if they ran. Previously, we had external drives connected to each of 4 edit systems. We were constantly filling them up and having to offload to other drives or Dual-layer DVDs…usually several times a month and it took several hours of monitoring and babysitting. Not to mention the ridiculous amount of overlap and duplication we had of video/audio files on SCSI and backup drives.
If we moved a project from one edit suite to the other, we had to move either the drives (a pain in the butt), or actually move the footage (slow and time-consuming) across the network, which was not all GigE at the time and often had to move from USB 2 or Firewire drives across the PC’s system bus, across the ethernet…etc. While transferring, it was hard to work on either system because of the load it put moving 10, 20, sometimes 100GB of data.
Now…we just close the project in one edit suite, walk down the hall, and open it in the other, and we’re back editing in 60 seconds!
It also frees scheduling since it doesn’t matter which suite something is scheduled in or whether it’s editing, compositing, graphics, 3D work etc. It’s all accessible from any of 4 suites all the time.Another small but important benefit, is we can grant access to all these assets to our office PC’s so if we want to watch shots or listen to audio in the conference room, or at somebody’s desk, we can do it…and it plays in real-time even on 7-8 year old PC’s as long as they have the correct codecs installed and are using GigE network cards (all but a couple office PC’s are now).
I could go on, but for all those people scared by the cost, if you look at the long-term benefits to workflow, productivity, etc. It’s worth the investment.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Chris,
You present a good case. Well documented. Rational. Intelligent.
Unfortunately, most people, when it comes to money, don’t think that way. Bob’s point is
they want to pay NOTHING!Shared storage is a concept that is “trickling down” from the high end IT enterprise world. Yes, it’s getting cheaper, but for most people, cheap isn’t good enough. They want it for FREE! Just like their
warez, pirated music and films.Reading the forums over the years, I have to agree with Mr. Zelin’s observation. If I was a storage manufacturer, I’d be seriously thinking about my price points and marketing efforts.
Mark
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Mark Raudonis Reading the forums over the years, I have to agree with Mr. Zelin’s observation. If I was a storage manufacturer, I’d be seriously thinking about my price points and marketing efforts.
Yup…I agree with that too. I’ve posted on here a few times about how most storage manufacturers and especially resellers that package RAIDs and storage products are clueless about what business people in general and video folks in particular want and need.
Their marketing is written like an engineering manual, and if you talk to most of these companies, their sales people are trying to sell you hardware instead of solutions.
An analogy would be if the auto manufacturers promoted nothing but the technology and engineering in their cars and said nothing about style, comfort, reliability etc.
I wasn’t a bit surprised when Ciprico went belly-up. Their pricing was ridiculous and their website and marketing was a mess. Even if you’re not computer saavy, it didnt’ take a lot of smarts to do the math and see that the component costs for their $40,000 shared storage system couldn’t have been more than $5000 or $6000. That’s some kind of markup for whatever tweaks they were doing “under the hood.” I think most people saw right through the hype and just passed them by. We didn’t even give them a look because their pricing so out of whack with reality.
A lot of these manufacturers also market shared storage like it’s astrophysics. Their websites and marketing are filled with jargon that an engineer would have trouble understanding. When I was researching companies 15-16 months ago, I found that most made the subject way more complicated than it needs to be, and they do a poor job of explaining or presenting what you REALLY need to make a system work.
It got so bad that when I found the Apace website, I was skeptical for the opposite reason: because their website and marketing made it sound do darn simple. I was convinced (by all the other folks) that it COULDN’T be this simple and for that reason I initially dismissed Apace. It was only later after I became convinced the other guys were full of crap that I contacted them. Once I started talking to them via emial and by phone, it quickly became clear these guys understood why people want and need shared storage, and that they KNOW how to get these systems to work with clean, simple interfaces and straightforward cabling and configuration.
Didn’t mean to get on a soapbox, but there are companies out there that are STILL charging $50-75k just for 12-24TB of shared storage that’s coupled with video playout servers and craft editing systems for broadcast groups and TV stations. That doesn’t include the cost for the playout hardware, servers etc. Now THAT’S crazy!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
i guess it totally depends on your client, but i’ve had a few different experiences. if your client is used to the fact that an HDCAM deck costs $65k and they paid $5k for their Sony broadcast monitor without blinking, then the costs might not scare them. but i’ve noticed that the idea of what’s expensive has drastically changed over the years. just like the reference to the $100,000 edit system, if you accept this cost, then you will generally accept higher costs. that’s just what things cost to do business. but now you can run the $1200 Final Cut suite on your $1000 MacBook. so how dare you try to sell me on a $30k shared storage system! and can’t you get me Final Cut for free?
the 3 most successful methods i’ve employed are: 1. show them the savings from reduced down-time and general inefficiencies, 2. get a big project to help pay for it, and 3. try to reuse equipment they already own.
the first Xsan system i did was over 3 years ago. at that point we had 2 G4-based systems with direct attached SCSI and FW800 drives. we worked on one movie and one TV series a year, so this worked. but we looked at bidding on a HUGE TV project that would need 6 editors working concurrently, all needing access to the same footage. Xsan was the obvious answer, but it was expensive. it would also necessitate the move to all HD. but we looked beyond that hellish short term project to what our office would be like afterword, and we liked what we saw – 4 HD edit systems all accessing the same footage. Sony HDCAM equipment. access to the SAN available to anyone in the office via ethernet. no more isolation, no more moving footage from here to there on external drives. not having to wait for an editor to get off “your” system. it took a huge project to pay for the equipment, but it was sooo worth it in the end. if we didnt get that huge project to foot the equipment bill, we probably wouldnt have made the jump. but seeing how efficient everything would be helped in the final decision. labor costs would go DOWN!
with the latest ethernet-based SAN i did, the tipping point for the client seemed to be the fact that we were reusing a G5 they already owned. so the $2800 up front cost that Bob mentioned went away. they liked the fact that even if they bought all new Mac Pros for their edit suites, they’re existing G5s could live on as servers.
the truth is, if they are already buying a crap load of firewire external drives, replacing these with a shared storage system is only marginally more expensive. if you take the difference between these 2 costs and present it to the client as “it will cost this much money to allow people to share” and then show them the cost savings from sharing, it just becomes obvious. at that point it almost looks like its free and any good production house owner will then see that it makes money. a lot of money. the reaction i then get is, “why the hell didnt we do this before?”
i agree with everything you guys have already said, but i thought i would add my 2 cents
e
Eric Hansen, The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com
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Eric Hansen the reaction i then get is, “why the hell didnt we do this before?”
Eric,
This is EXACTLY what me and my two partners said after we had our NAS based shared system in place for a couple of months. Like you mention, it took a big project to spur us to even look into it and then to be able to justify buying it. We lost the client to the economy (they closed 80% of their original 450 stores), but in the end, it was the smartest hardware investment we’ve ever made.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
i will add that Bob’s comments about FREE are funnier the more i think about it. once i go through the rigamarole of convincing the client they need to do this, that it’s actually OK to spend money (in many cases more than they thought) and it will save them money in the not so long run, i then tell them my installation fee and they look at me like i just kicked their dog. i guess that part of the experience will never change. but it always surprises me that people are shocked, SHOCKED that i want to charge them for my services. and for some, the thoughts of “hey he just told me everything he’s going to do, i can do this myself” start going through their heads. i’ve dealt with a few of those, as i’m sure you all have. hell, they post things like “do i have to get a license for every computer?” questions on here everyday. it really does make me appreciate the long-term clients i have that understand what things cost. in all cases, these are the ones that have been in production since the tape-to-tape days and have owned quite a few pieces of $50k+ equipment. chasing the possible new clients that want things for free gets very tiring very fast.
e
Eric Hansen, The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com
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The cost of a SAN system, at least for our operation, was very quickly offset by time savings and the convenience factor. Inspired by Bob Zelin’s original “do it yourself SAN” article last summer, I built a system which provides shared media storage for three WinXP-based Avid Media Composer rooms. We use Tiger’s metaLAN software. We use gigabit ethernet connections, including quad port aggregation between the server and switch, and have 3TB of eSATA storage (4 x 1TB drives), in RAID5. Our 8-bay enclosure will let us double the storage capacity when we’re ready. This system is not everything for everyone, but is more than adequate for our DVCProHD projects, not to mention SD work. Total cost of commonly available off-the-shelf components, including the metaLAN software, was under $6000. Building and tweaking it was not fun, but not onerous either. At this price, I don’t see how anyone in a similar sized operation can afford not to have shared storage.
Steve York
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