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shared storage for 3 seats of FCP
I read Bob Zelin’s article and it has given me hope. I run a production department with 3 seats of FCP. We edit almost exclusively DVCPRO HD and Prores.
Normally we have one edit machine running full time, the other one running FCP and Motion 50% of the time, and the other running FCP 10% of the time.
We normally are at two layers at the most.
They are all mac pro’s connected to a gigabit switch connected to an xserve running final cut server, with an xraid connnected. We’re at 6.5 TB and we’re out of space.
We need to buy new storage, and while we’re at it we’d love to edit in place. Going XSAN will take us up to the 70k range by the time installation is done. We’re considering a terrablock, but with edit in place we’re at about 60k. Did I mention we’re a non-profit?
I’d love to be able to maybe upgrade our switch, buy another machine to handle the network, keep FCSvr on the xserve, and buy some more storage and edit in place.
Has anyone done this? Has anything changed since Bob’s article was written? The ability to edit in place over gig-e would just be phenomenal. This year I maybe have 25k for the whole thing.
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10 Replies
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This is a completely reasonable work flow and budget. Considering your codecs and current storage, I’m guessing your looking in the 16TB range, but that’s just a guess.
For dual stream DVCPro HD and Prores work, you can use iSCSI or FC. Depending on a few things, I could definitely design a system based on EVO hardware https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/product_detail.php?pi=12 for under 20k.
Feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss specifics (And yes, I do give non-profit discounts)
Nathaniel Cooper
ncooper@studionetworksolutions.com
818 209 1331 -
Hey thanks for posting —
If I were you, I’d shoot over to the Small Tree forum. Over there you can find out about GraniteSTOR ST-RAID’s for Video.
Small Tree designs and qualifies Real Time Ethernet based Shared Storage solutions. For your little amount of people, and your smaller budget that cannot be made to spend 20K +, a GraniteSTOR would be a perfect fit, and it won’t cost you 20K, even for 16TB of Small Tree “real-time” qualified GraniteSTOR ST-RAID storage!
Go check them out!
Find the Small Tree Forum here —
https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree -
is your real name Walnut Crunch ?
You need a MAC Pro with 8 gig of RAM, you need a disk drive array, and you need some specialty ethernet equipment which costs about 2 grand. that is all you need to do ProRes422HQ and DVCProHD.
Oh, I forgot one very important thing – you need someone to help you configure all this equipment.You can contact https://www.maxxdigital.com, and get a turnkey solution for very little money, or you can try to piece it together yourself, and ask lots of questions. This type of system is now becomming widely accepted (now that lots of people are doing it). Ethernet shared storage was pioneered by EditShare, but now there are much cheaper ways of doing it. You don’t need fibre, you dont’ need site licenses per client.
Bob Zelin
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Appears I haven’t posted since you needed to use real names, so bye bye walnut crunch, best donut ever.
Anyway
This is exactly what I’m trying to figure out. We already have the xserve and a raid array. We need more storage so we do need to buy another array. Ethernet seems very interesting because we can meet our storage needs and get edit in place for within our budget it seems.
Right now, we upload all our footage to the array through FCSvr, and then download and cache it locally on our machines for editing. FCSvr, helps track all the footage but it is time consuming to cache it.
Ethernet keeps it from being too expensive.
Final Cut Server is probably a small wrinkle in how we incorporate that. Our IS department likes the idea of using ethernet instead of fibre as they aren’t big fans of fibre due to cost, and overkill.
They are corporate IS, not video specialists, but I think if they knew what needed to be done on the networking side, they could easily pull it off.
So basically the macpro would function as the metadata and networking controller?
I guess what I’m asking, is if you had our system 3 mac pro’s, gigabit network, xserve connected to 6TB protected Xraid running FCSvr as asset management, what hardware would you add for a reliable edit in place FCP setup?
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You should also at least take a look at Apace’s offerings. They’re very affordable, they work with Final Cut/Mac, they’re scalable, and their customer service is the best I’ve ever experienced in 25 years working in this business. Contact their reseller in California first…IEEI, Inc.
https://www.ieei.com/ieeibroadcast/vstor.shtml
Dennis Bress is the contact and again…his customer service along with engineering support from Apace was unbelievable during our decision making. And we spoke with folks at EditShare, Studio Network Solutions, 2 Degrees Frost (avoid them), as well as a host of folks that build custom systems using third party hardware and software from Tiger Technology and otherw. I should also mention the guys at Tiger Technology are super too, but we just didn’t have the people or know-how to build a DIY system. The total cost of our system was just over $15,000, and that included the Apace vStor, a 48 port managed switch, a lot of new cabling in the server room, several new Gig-E ethernet cards, a 4GB Lacie Ethernet Backup drive, a 2GB LaCie ethernet drive for projects, some new patch-panels, and a rack for the all those rack-mountable drive units, and professional installation. You could easily get an 8TB vStor and all the rest mentioned for around $20-24K. Our system is all Gig-E and we used existing cabling that was run to 4 edit suites. We edit primarily DVCPro50 stuff and can run all 4 edit systems simultaneously and get at least 2 to 3 real-time channels. We can capture SD uncompressed without issue and do Cineform and Blackmagic MJPG HD capture fine as well.
We’ve had their system for 22 months and it’s run 24/7 since the day it was installed. We’ve had to make one support call…and that was because we couldn’t find the power switch to turn it back on after a power outage (it’s tiny and recessed). It defragments itself automatically so I’ve quite literally not done more than 5 minutes of administration on this thing since it was installed. Prior to that, I probably spent 2 hours a week jacking around with our direct attached SCSCI arrays troubleshooting a variety of issues, from file corruption to administering backups to finding and deleting redundant backup files and duplicated clips across systems etc.
Anyway…certainly explore Bob’s DIY solution, it’s a proven, workable solution for Mac and Final Cut. But if you have 20K, I think you’d be better off buying a system that works out of the box that comes with great tech support.
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Jeff writes –
I guess what I’m asking, is if you had our system 3 mac pro’s, gigabit network, xserve connected to 6TB protected Xraid running FCSvr as asset management, what hardware would you add for a reliable edit in place FCP setup?You cannot use your existing ethernet network. A second cable must be run to be on a dedicated network. All your MAC Pro’s have a second ethernet port. You stick a multiport ethernet card in your XServe, link aggregate it to a NEW HI SPEED SWITCH (like the Small Tree ES4528V) and plug in each of the “ethernet port 2’s” of each MAC Pro FCP system into this new dedicated ethernet switch. No, you can’t set up a VLAN on your existing switch for this application. No, you can’t run your office network, and use your existing ethernet drop (going into ethernet port 1) on your MAC Pro FCP systems.
As for your storage – I forgot what you have (or did you tell me). Do you have an Apple XServe RAID with an Apple FC card ? What is your drive array. You can add (or replace) your drives with an Active Storage Fibre array (expensive), or you can abandon your existing storage, and go with a new super fast hi speed SATA array. You will quickly find that the type of drive array, and host adaptor that you use is VERY VERY IMPORTANT, because if you have latency issues, you will get dropped frame errors, no matter how fast your drive array is.
All the companies that have responded (Maxx Digital, Small Tree, Studio Network Solutions, Apace, FibreJet) all have excellent solutions, but let assure you of one thing – if you rely on your dopey IT department who think that they can “cluge” it together, you will fail, and your boss will fire you for wasting his time and money.
Bob Zelin
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Bob brings up some important points about the network. The configuration he describes is almost exactly how our system was set-up and configured…and we’re on Windows. The only exception is we use one 48 port, managed Gig-E switch for everything…office and edit suite traffic. The vStor doesn’t require you to keep your office PC data traffic separate from your edit suite data traffic on separate switches. Perhaps this is possible using the Small Tree switches as well.
Our 4 edit systems all have 2 Gig-E ethernet cards, one is connected to the regular network, the other to the Apace vStor. The vStor uses link aggregation to speed throughput. So one ethernet card in the edit suite is connected to the vStor ONLY, and the other to the regular office network. That way, you can have connectivity to both the shared video storage and your office network in your edit suites. The Apace system also offers the ability to use one of your edit systems as a “gateway” of sorts for all your other office computers to see your shared video files (via a specific IP address). So we have one edit system that is used primarily for compositing (doesn’t really need real-time all the time) set up to allow the 11 other office PCs to have access to video and audio files. It works beautifully, and it doesn’t seem to have much if any impact on the the performance of the vStor.
I don’t know if this is possible with other vendors solutions or if it’s possible on Mac/Final Cut configurations, but this setup and configuration was one of the things that factored in our decision to use Apace systems stuff. I do know Apace fully supports Mac and Final Cut.
When the Apace drive array isn’t real full, we get between 85-90MB/sec read speeds and 60-75MB/sec write speeds on all 4 edit systems, enough for 8 or more streams of DVCPRo50 (total streams across all suites) and enough for a 3-4 of DVCProHD. Test speeds drop about 10-15% as the drives get filled up, but frankly we don’t notice any difference in performance in the edit suites.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
This is all great information, thank-you, I knew there were some solutions besides fibre. So far, with three integrators, all we were hearing is fibre, fibre, fibre. I guess that’s the way because fibre has more than enough bandwidth meaning, no chance of problems.
The key for us is how this all works with final cut server. FCSvr tracks all of our footage, manages the check out check in and everything.
I think how this would work best is our xserve with final cut server, currently fibre attached to our xraid (8TB), then have that gig-e attached to a macpro which is direct attached to the new high speed array. Our active footage, stuff we use a lot, would be on the new array, and we’d keep the xraid as a near-line or as FCSvr calls it, an archive device.
Basically FCSvr is our browser for all of our footage. If we need to access footage or upload it, we go through FCSvr.
I think with that setup it would be fine. As long as volume mounts on the desktop of FCSvr it can be used.
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most professional integrators want to sell the most expensive solution, so they can make the most money. Ethernet is very do-able.
The problem with a limited drive array (you say XRAID – I assume you do NOT own an Active STorage array, but an old Apple XServe RAID) is that even with fibre, everything only moves as fast as your drive array. The Apple XServe RAID worked at 220Mb/sec with 14 drives, which is NOTHING by today’s standards. (everyone gets 500 – 700 Mb/sec and greater these days).
When you look at the “cheap” fibre solutions – like you see now advertised by Sonnet Technology, and others, it “maxes out” at 4 clients, and then you have to add a fibre switch to expand beyond 4 clients. Even with 4 clients, you still must buy a fibre card per MAC, and a seat of FibreJet software ($1000 each) to make this work.
Although this is a nice solution, it’s expensive compared to anyone’s ethernet solution.Bob Zelin
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hey jeff
you say: “The key for us is how this all works with final cut server. FCSvr tracks all of our footage, manages the check out check in and everything.
I think how this would work best is our xserve with final cut server, currently fibre attached to our xraid (8TB), then have that gig-e attached to a macpro which is direct attached to the new high speed array. Our active footage, stuff we use a lot, would be on the new array, and we’d keep the xraid as a near-line or as FCSvr calls it, an archive device.
Basically FCSvr is our browser for all of our footage. If we need to access footage or upload it, we go through FCSvr.
I think with that setup it would be fine. As long as volume mounts on the desktop of FCSvr it can be used”
FCSvr will definitely work in an arrangement like that. but your limitation may be that single GigE line. I have a client with Final Cut server and some Xserve RAIDs that they want to make into a stock footage archive, while using new SAS storage as the main editing storage along with a new Mac Pro. so for that i suggested taking the 2 ethernet ports on the Xserve (direct attached to Xserve RAIDs) and aggregating them to the Small Tree switch. this is the same way the new server would attach, but with the main server you would want to aggregate over more ethernet lines so you can support multiple concurrent editors. with 2 ethernet lines, you shouldn’t have any problem accessing the Xserve RAID volumes from the editing computers assuming it would only be accessed occasionally. that’s the case with my client, but you might want to add a multi-port ethernet card to your Xserve. note that the Xserve does not attach to the Mac Pro server. everything runs through the ethernet switch with link aggregation. you would just have 2 servers with shared storage instead of the usual 1.
Bob makes a great point about IT guys. in my experience its the IT guys with years of experience that have the hardest time wrapping their heads around the “video editing over ethernet” concept. no IT person believes that ethernet’s fast enough and dismisses it.
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Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com
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