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vsnstorage-promise-avid isis
Hi guys, we had some offers to update our system and we had to choose between some vendors: VSN storage, Promise apple and Avid Isis. we have 65 editing clients, 20 of those running fibre and 45 running over gigabit ethernet all editing FCP.
The worst case scenario is all of them editing 35 to 50 Mbps video at a time. because of limited budget we had to choose promise raid and a mixture of xsan for fibre and afp share for gigabit ethernet. i need some advice to know if having the right switches, the right cabling, the right set up and enough luck would it be possible to make the afp share run all those 45 clients without dropping frames direct cut from the afp share.
i can make use of 4 xserves and 3 promise vtrak E class to accomplish the afp task. i guess it sounds enough to make it run well, but from my experience with promise raid im not really sure. id like to hear about some one elses experience.
any advice guys will be really appreciated
regards
KB
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7 Replies
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In my opinion, AFP is not a great transport network for large volumes of clients. I use AFP for our system, and we are lucky to get 10 clients working at a time. In my opinion, you will have trouble if you try to get 45 clients to connect to a shared volume, and get consistant results, if all 45 are reading and writing to the same group of shared volumes. I assume you are using FCP (and not AVID) for this, as simple AFP will not work for even 2 AVID’s. I also assume that you are running OS-X Server.
AFP and ethernet is great for a small workgroup, but I think you will fail with the number of clients that you want to serve. I don’t care what drive arrays you use.
the new “low cost” AVID ISIS system that just got released maxes out at 40 users. You need a big system.
Bob Zelin
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I agree with Bob here. AFP will probably NOT provide a “satified user experience”.
You say you’re using 4 X-serves as clients to feed 45 AFP seats. That’s 11.5 users per X-serve… which is in my opinion, pushing the limits. You don’t say what kind of work is being done by your clients, but what guarantees do you have that any of the AFP clients won’t start pulling major bandwidth (multicam, multi images, stills, etc). This is the stuff that will quickly bring your AFP users to a halt.
This is both a “delivery bandwidth” issue and a Raid bandwidth issue. It also depends on what your clients are actually doing. HD? SD? How many streams each? What is an acceptable level of performance for those clients.
AFP works great for certain specific situations. Yours doesn’t sound like one of them. Sorry.
Mark
PS. If you said you’re willing to work at “Off-line RT” resolution, then maybe, just maybe it would work.
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Hi dudes, i really appeciate your help. people will be working with after effects, photoshop, maya and the worst case bandwith scenario would be all clients editing HD video xdcam 35Mbps at a time, lets say 2 video layers each.
Maybe i can go up to 5 xserves and 3 promise raid boxes, each 16TB total 48TB, all AFP. That is what i got. iIl reduce afp latency as much as i can by fine tuning the system. Im not sure if there is any benefit from having more than 8GB RAM per xserve in this case.
Bob, what you say about big system is refered to have many more storage boxes or can you tell please any advice about that? i guess that promise and xserve system is what i will have to deal with. if not AFP do you know any other option to run over Xserves? would i push harder enough AFP limits by using small tree 6 channels ethernet cards in each server?
by the way, avid told us that we would be able to run all those clients with 3 boxes and 2 director units.
any advice will be well comed
regards
KB
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Hey Rodrigo –
you are just being crazy. You want to run a BIG system, and you want to spend no money. My entire product is based on Small Tree hardware – but don’t listen to me – call Small Tree directly. You ain’t gonna be getting 45 clients to run on a 6 port ethernet card over AFP. It’s not going to happen. Believe me, if it were possible, I would be asking for your contact information so I could set this up for you (and charge you money for it).Bob Zelin
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Hi Bob, thanks for your comments, surely ill try to push for VSN or Avid’s Isis instead. ive contacted small tree guys before but institutional requirements needs ST to have offices in our country. id like to go to a really pro system but is seems difficult to approve a 500K one. anyway if you have any comment about those any word is welcomed.
best
Rodrigo
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Hello Rodrigo,
What types of computers are these 45 systems running over GbE?
Towers, iMacs, laptops?Are you currently running in an XSAN / StorNext environment?
We have systems which can deliver block level performance to storage over Gigabit Ethernet using iSCSI, as well as 10GbE and Fibre Channel.
Check out our EVO Storage Server, which provides both SAN and NAS functions:
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/video-san.php
Best Regards,
Caspian Brand
Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions -
Hi Rodrigo,
If you are going to build an Xsan, choose Active Storage, no Promise. That is the first advice. Your setup is not the recomended one, two many clients on any AFP share will compromise the whole system.
We have installed something similar in Televisa Mexico, but did a different way.
Let me know if we can help.PS: Hablamos español.
Diego Buenaño
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