10GB SAN for Davinci Resolve 12.

[Sam Mestman]

Hey Nat,

At Lumaforge, we happen to make a NAS that is perfect for Resolve 12. Not only that, but we’re happy to put our system up under any kind of real world test you’d like to see. We do gigabit, 10G, or 40G Ethernet direct to the client, and our system works for OSX, Windows, or LInux. Over 40G, we can do 4K open EXR in a shared environment on Resolve.

Bottom line is that, we’d love to talk with you about your needs, and we’re happy to give you a demo to whatever your specs are for performance. Drop me an email at sam@lumforge.com and let’s talk. I think you’ll be really happy with what we have to show you.

Sam Mestman
CEO – Lumaforge systems
https://www.lumaforge.com

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Nat –
did you contact Sam Mestman ? How was the LumaForge ?
Have you contacted Facilis ? Did you make a purchase yet ?

We are all interested to hear what you are going to buy !

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Andrew Mckay]

Hey Nat,

We can do better than a certification…, We have many customers actually using Resolve with the EVO share storage server and would be happy to put you in contact with end users to discuss their experience. More info on EVO – https://www.snsevo.com

Other reasons to look at EVO from Studio Network Solutions:

Native Avid Bin Sharing
Project Locking for Adobe CC and FCP
Embedded Easy Asset Management: Search, Index, Tag, Proxy Preview, and Verify Data
Supports Resolve, Autodesk, Cinema4D, Pro Tools, Logic, Nuendo, and more
Cloud integration with Dropbox, Hightail, OneDrive, and other services
LDAP/AD support
NAS and SAN in the same chassis
Mix SATA, SAS, and SSD in same chassis
Repurpose existing or legacy storage

[Steve Chandler]

Yikes! The vendors are really circling the boat on this one. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise when you’re dropping 10GbE SAN and Resolve 12 questions into the water like hot buckets of chum… 😉

We are running a 10GbE XSAN solution here at our small post production company which we mostly designed ourselves. We had some hiccups during the initial spinup of the whole thing. We originally had it set up as a NAS, but Premiere didn’t like it. We transitioned to a XSAN and had some initial configuration problems there as well.

I mention all of this because during that time, Resolve performed like a champ – both on a NAS and on a SAN. I don’t reall having any playback issues at all, even while our other NLEs were having lots of problems. Judging from the comments above as well, Resolve seems quite good at handling itself on lots of platforms (Premiere is the one to worry about… but thats another story!)

Obviously you should still keep all of the usual considerations in mind when dealing with video shared storage. I’m just offering my anecdotal evidence here, which is by no case authoritative since we are still fine-tuning our network.

All in all, it performs just fine. I wouldn’t worry too much about Resolve compatibility, and instead focus more on any other requirements you have for your SAN.

Oh, and I jest with you, vendors… you have some great products on here with even greater support, but sometimes people are just looking for general information and it comes off as a bit much in situations like these.

[Nat Jencks]

Steve, can you be more specific about the problems you had with premiere and NAS? I do use premiere. And FCP. And Nuke. And After effects, and etc etc etc. Resolve is my main thing and where I am 99% of the time, but if any of my other apps may have issues I need to know what type of problems they might be.

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated!

What protocol were you using NFS, SMB, of AFP?

best-
Nat

[Bob Zelin]

1) is this Steve Chandler of Pretty Damn Sweet in Philly ?

2) ya know, Nat, since you are in NY City, you could simply call Tekserve or YatesParks to have a system installed for you that will work perfectly. Would you like their contact information? They do it for pretty much everyone in NY, except for you, obviously !

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Elvin Jasarevic]

Hi Nat,

We have lots of users with Resolve working even with 4K 10Bit DXP uncompressed which is over 1.2GB/s single stream.

But don’t take my word for it, why don’t you ask guys from Resolve in Singapore what tests we showed them on DDP?

We can do demo in your facility if you are serious and really looking for ultimate IP SAN.

Elvin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Elvin –
I think that Nat would LOVE a demo in NY City.
His direct email is nat@outlierpost.com

He is obviously very anxious to buy a system that will work with Resolve for a couple of users,
and I am sure that he would love to demo your system.

Please let me know how things go.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Steve Chandler]

The very same Bob :). Long time no talk! Enjoyed your new article on LTO btw.

Nat – the (semi)short answer is that Premiere historically has not liked working off of network drives, and while those problems are supposedly fixed these days… we had a bad time with it. It needs to be said that we had a bunch of other variables at the time (new version of Premiere, new footage format on a project), and there are many companies out there who claim to do this without issues.

It all SHOULD have worked, we kept having people tell us… but it just didn’t. Playback sucked. It was probably a combination of factors, but the fact remains that as soon as we switched to a true SAN with block-level access, those playback problems all but went away, and any additional issues were certainly easier to diagnose and fix.

Lots of theories came up: Premiere cache sucking up bandwidth while conforming footage; MTS footage not performing well on a NAS; block size on our RAID being too large; Premiere not understanding the larger bandwidth pipe it had from 10GbE… None of these were ever really proven or disproven.

That’s abut all I’ve got for you, sorry it’s not more concrete, but this was our experience. Like I mentioned, almost ANY 10GbE NAS should work file with Resolve, and I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out any Premiere problems you have, if any. All-in-all, 10GbE NAS systems are pretty darn cool (though a 10GbE XSAN is even cooler 8) )