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recommendations for SAN experts in NYC
Hello-
Long time reader first time poster here so hoping Bob doesn’t eat me alive in on post #1.
Our company built out a SAN for use with final cut pro with some outside help in NYC. Things didn’t go so smoothly so now we have basically purchased a bunch of equipment that needs to be re-configured to work with FCP.
Can anyone recommend a few reputable people in new york city that could come in and take existing hardware and make it work (and also support the system)? We already have the RAID Box, the computer (pc), cards for the computers and infrastructure. We’d really like to use what we have as we have already invested into the infrastructure and starting over is just not something we want to do at this point. We thought maybe there was a way to run linux on the PC but open to ideas. We just need someone who can come in and save the day/finish the job.
thanks in advance for your recommendations.
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9 Replies
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What do you have and what are you trying to do?
Specifically, what RAID box?
what computers? # of Macs and # of PCs? purpose of each in your workflow?
What cards for the computers, GbE or Fibre Channel or both?
There are a number of folks in the NYC area that can help you out, but you might also want to provide some of us on the Forums a bit more details as well so we can point you in the right direction depending on your needs, there’s a lot of good knowledge and experience on here that can help you.
Regards,
-CaspianProduct Specialist
Studio Network Solutions -
They are my top recommendation. Speak to Brandon Yates or Noah Parks.
Bob Zelin
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Thanks Bob!
Was hoping to get a few different vendors so I can get a few quotes. I would assume there are probably a few good companies/people in NYC who do this type of work. Anyone else have additional recommendations?
thanks
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Caspian-
Thanks for your post. I am trying to run 4 macs as edit machines that can also digitize. All on a SAN capable of all accessing the same media (media ranges from dvcpro to uncompressed hd). The raid box and PC server are in the same case made by supermicro and is the only pc in the mix. We are running cx4 so we have cx4 cards in all the macs and the pc and have a cx4 switch.
let me know your thoughts and if you have any recommendations for help in NYC.
thanks
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All Mobile Video
TekServedo you actually think that there are countless people – even in NY – than can configure a video SAN ? Do you think this is like calling up a plumber from the phone book.
I gave you the proper recommendation in my original post. do you want it to work ?
Bob Zelin
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Hey Bob-
I am with you I do realize there are not an infinite # of people who do this kind of work in and around the NYC area.
Unfortunately none of the people you listed were able to help me out in my situation so the hunt for a qualified FCP SAN builder continues…
thanks
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Hi James,
If you’d like to check out some options feel free to give me a call or email.
Steve Manella
Broadcast & Facilities Engineer
The Studio – B&H -
Whose CX4 cards are you using in the Macs?
Is your PC server running a flavor of Windows?
Is it currently being used to store content in production?
Having someone just reconfigure what you have might be a challenge, as it sounds a bit home brewed, and Integrators may not be willing to take on support of hardware they didn’t spec out.
Bob’s recommendation of Yates and Parks looked promising, I’ve not worked with them myself, but I would trust Bob’s input here. I’ve done a lot of work with Tekserve, and they’re awesome to work with. I’m positive Tekserve or the other folks Bob mentioned would be more than able to build you out an FCP based SAN or Shared Storage system, I just don’t know if anyone is going to want to take on supporting a storage server they didn’t provide. Again, such is the challenge of your position.
Ultimately, if you want to repurpose your PC based Server to house central storage for Mac clients, it will need to support iSCSI Target mode or AFP (or both). Windows 2008 Server no longer supports SFM (services for Macintosh or AFP) without additional 3rd party software. Even with these changes there’s no guarantee you’ll get the performance you desire, as this will also be largely dependent on the configuration of the server’s RAID, CPU, and RAM.
When creating a shared storage system for high performance media demands it’s always best to cater to the dominant OS, in your case the Mac OS, which means the best approach is to stick to Native File Systems (using Fibre or iSCSI Targets) and Native File Sharing protocols (like AFP).
Regards,
-CaspianProduct Specialist
Studio Network Solutions -
Hi James,
I think you or the customer has talked to Matt a few times over here at Small Tree about this issue.For those of you perusing this thread or in a situation similar to James, I suggest you talk to us first.
Our entire business model is to implement high end network services on Macs (FCoE, Link aggregation, iSCSI, 10Gb etc), and then sell that. Obviously people use it for networking storage and editing, so over time we got hit with so many storage issues, we started to carry switches and storage. I got sick of people blaming their Gb ports when we could see their switches couldn’t handle the traffic (no flow control) or their storage had way too much latency. The vendors would always shrug their shoulders and say “but it goes 800MB/sec.” (That doesn’t make a difference when you’re talking frame rates)
We supported realtime stuff for NASA, for the Airforce, for the Army, and for the big animation houses like Disney and Dreamworks while we were at SGI. Not only can we write drivers, we know how the unix kernel works and how IO and networking interact.
I can promise you are are the best value out there in a working solution. The prices are low because we have very little overhead. We exhaustively test everything and we’ve actually contributed a ton of code to the open source world just to get the right utilities working for Mac so we could generate the loads we need (no one else is doing load generation like us.)
I don’t mind so much that people try DIY and buy stuff from Newegg. I can promise one of two things will happen. It won’t work and you will learn to live with it, or you won’t be able to live with it and you’ll eventually call us looking for something that works. That’s the most common call we get. 🙁
So you can buy from guys that don’t understand drivers and the kernel at all, or you can buy from computer engineers that supported top 500 Supercomputers (including the Big Mac at VT and the *bigger* Mac at Colsa!)
One last bonus to buying from Small Tree. We make all this work on a mac. So when you upgrade your server or repurpose the storage for the next project, that Mac can go on someone’s desk. If you build something with linux or windows or buy someone’s linux black box, that’s a throw away system. Everything I sell you will work for a long time and you won’t be wasting a lot of money.
Steve
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