• Storage & Archiving

  Partitions and work flows

  Posted by Mike Hartung on November 9, 2010 at 6:19 pm

  Hello,
  I’m looking for new ideas about partitioning and work flows for my raid system. We deal mostly with audio in a professional, multiple-room facility. My idea has been that we have one partition per studio (three studios in our case) and also a couple private partitions. As it will often occur, session engineers need assistants to prep and clean up the audio that has been recorded while work continues in the main studios. This got me wondering if I have the right angle on the work flow in order to keep things as tidy as possible when it comes to consolidating and keeping track. I have thought about having a lot of smaller partitions (ie one partition per project) and I have also considered keeping things organized by user (each engineer/assistant has their own partition).

  I would love to hear some other user stories, even if it involves the video world; there are definite parallels in the two.

  Thank you!

  Mike

  Mike Hartung replied 15 years, 6 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Bob Zelin

  November 10, 2010 at 3:05 am

  if you have 3 Pro Tools systems, and want shared storage, this means iSCSI, which in turn means Studio Network Solutions. A generic RAID array will NOT work with ProTools systems, and certainly not in a shared storage enviorment.

  Bob Zelin
• 

  Mike Hartung

  November 10, 2010 at 8:12 pm

  Hi Bob,

  I have an iscsi raid up and running, thanks to SNS. My original question has to do with work flow in relation to partitioning. I would be interested in hearing from others who have more experience than me.

  Any insight is appreciated.

  Thanks!

  Mike
• 

  Eric Hansen

  November 11, 2010 at 9:20 pm

  Pro Tools is a strange beast when it comes to using storage. our PT system only push/pulls files from the ethernet SAN. it has it’s own RAID-1 drive over FW800 for mixing.

  coming from video editing, i’m really leery of partitions. mostly because it’s a real pain to modify them without bringing the whole system down and erasing everything. at my current facility, we created 4 partitions on the 2 RAIDs on the SAN and broke them up so each partition was used by each editing system. well, this didn’t work as we would have 3 edit systems working on the same project, or editors moving around to different edit systems. when we got a 3rd RAID, i changed it to 3 volumes for the 3 RAIDs with no partitions. as the projects come in, they are placed onto the volume with the most free space. using partitions to create virtual walls in the storage was just over complicating things for everyone.

  i would only do it if there’s performance or compatibility reasons

  e

  Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
• 

  Mike Hartung

  November 13, 2010 at 7:05 pm

  Hi Eric,

  Thanks for your input. Our protools systems seem to be running very well with multiple rooms able to work without even noticing that we are using an iscsi SAN. In fact, on very large sessions, the SAN beats the pants off a local FW 800 drive when it comes to response time when you press play. Im soon going to receive my new SAN appliance and I want to redo things a little diffrrently when i set it up this time. Right now I have it set up as two LUNs eact parted into four partitions. This looks like 8 available volumes in the SNS client software. I’m thinking of having a partition per studio and then a couple separate partitions for the senior engineers. Then there is the whole security issue. It will be a bit of a puzzle to setup the accounts. Any thoughts or tips for administering a SAN for this kind of setup?

  Thanks!

  Mike

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