Advice on a new 16 bay FC RAID Chassis – Rouke/Dulce/Enhance Tech

[Chuck Mcmakin]

Hi Simon.

We’ve tested both Rorke Data’s and Enhance Technology’s RAID arrays with FibreJet here in our lab at CommandSoft.

To support the streams you are describing you need to apply more spindles to the workload.

Depending on the vintage of 16-bay Rorke chassis you have, you may be able to add a SAS JBOD expansion chassis but you would probably still have to be willing to reconfigure the existing storage in order to optimize the throughput. Rorke says that the 16-bay chassis with the expansion chassis will support 4 10-bit HD 1080P streams or 4 x 2K streams in that combination.

Otherwise, if you simply invest in another 16-bay, single controller 4 Gb chassis, you should still be able to get 2 10-bit HD 1080P streams or a single 2K stream from one system.

Please do note that I’ve stated “or” not 2 1080P streams “and” a 2K stream.

It’s all about the spindle count and the efficiencies of the RAID controllers.

Fortunately for you, choosing FibreJet as your SAN manager gives you a transport-independent solution. This empowers you to choose whichever storage offers you your best value while remaining comfortable that the FibreJet software won’t ever get in the way of realizing maximium performance available from your choice in hardware.

Feel free to contact us directly if you have additional questions.

Chuck McMakin
CommandSoft, Inc. /
Phone: (805)730-7772 /
Email: chuck@commandsoft.com

[Sean Oneil]

[Simon Krom] “The current setup has the 2 raid chassis split into the native 2 x 8 drive RAID5 groups per chassis and pumps out around 170-190MB/sec (from 8 drives), so HD 10bit Uncompressed is hit and miss.”

Something is wrong there. It should be getting double that. 16 disks should easily saturate the 4gb bandwidth. Are you sure your switch or one of the controllers isn’t set for 2gb FC?

Sean

[Ryan Stoutenborough]

“My boss is unwilling to clean off the current chassis’s to start again as there is to many jobs, hours and life tided there (basically the whole business)”

Please tell me your boss has a back-up/archive solution. RAID is not a backup! If you don’t already have one, I would invest in an archive solution before buying anything else.

Infortrend (OEM Rourke) makes a good product. Don’t know much about the other vendors.

Ryan Stoutenborough
Studio Network Solutions
Phone: 877.537.2094 ext. 208
ryans@studionetworksolutions.com
http://www.studionetworksolutions.com

[Robert Leong]

[Simon Krom] “has the benefit of not needing the software stripe as all the drives are seen as one RAID5”

Hi Simon, you are correct. The PRO FC has one high-performance RAID controller and it manages all 16 drives, this is then presented as 1 LUN to the computer(s). This is a preferred method in a SAN configuration as it simplifies the FC port assignments and such. Additionally, both FC ports of this one controller can easily be used to aggregate the bandwidth and take advantage of MacOS’s built-in Multipathing I/O. This gives you 510+MB/sec data rate without complications of striping two LUNs.

Updated web site with stream count info, click here and scroll towards bottom.

We have also introduced the new PRO IDC which has two controllers and much faster… PRO IDC link.

Robert Leong / Dulce Tech Support

[Sean Oneil]

I gotta say, it’s pretty astounding the number of people who create a topic in the SANnetworks board asking a question (usually a long one) and they never follow-up to any of the replies. Look below at how many there are.

Sean

[Bob Zelin]

I completely agree with Sean. It’s kind of sad.
This guy writes –
“My boss is unwilling to clean off the current chassis’s to start again as there is to many jobs, hours and life tided there (basically the whole business). ”

It’s my opinion that this is a “kid” that “know everything about computers” and his boss has told him to look into shared storage, and he is over his head. He does some basic research, doesn’t understand it, and asks on Cow. (nothing wrong with that). He gets some answers, but doesn’t really understand what he is being told. Unfortunately, a LOT of people think that if they buy a Rorke/Dulce/Enhance fibre array, all of a sudden, they have shared storage. When “we” confuse them with the facts “try fibrejet software, try MetaLan, you need a QLogic switch”, etc. they get confused and afraid, and probably say “I though all I had to do was buy a Rorke Fibre array and we woudl have shared storage – why are these mean people writing all this confusing stuff to me”.

With that said, the company that one day comes out with a DHCP “plug and play” NAS that is fast enough to play back ProRes422HQ will win the battle, and put all of these other solutions out of business. It is clear to me that people want EASY more than they want anything else. Even if “company X” comes out with a NAS solution that can’t do “this and that”- if it can just plug in and work – they will win. Just look at Dobro – they have so many people convinced that they are a shared storage solution.

Bob Zelin

[Allan White]

Bob, your sentiments about uniformed users buying SAN systems are right on – but I need to raise a point here.

I was one of them. I needed to build a SAN for my editing team (a non-tech-savvy group) when I came on board at my company. So, I researched it, got as much input as I could, and settled on a 3-station MetaSAN system with an Apple XRAID (going on 2 years ago now). I spent SOOO much time researching it and trying to get it all to work.

If I did it all again, I would without hesitation bring in an integrator to do it, soup-to-nuts. Not hiring one wasn’t worth the time I lost.

My point is this: I want to encourage you integrators out there, make a case for what you do! It’s nebulous and the value isn’t clear to the newbies out there who know enough to KNOW they need shared storage, but don’t know where to go from there.

When I look for “SAN vendors” I get the software & hardware manufacturers, many of which are happy to sell you their piece of the puzzle. Some do encourage you to talk to an integrator*, but the point often gets lost in the mountain of info to absorb.

The popularity of Bob’s DIY SAN solution article is case-in-point for a need for this.

It’s still my fault for not knowing this (though, in hindsight, not sure how I could have learned it otherwise). I guess I’d like to see the experts who can *actually solve the entire business problem* make themselves heard, do so. Vendors: tout your favorite integrators! Make them your “partners” so you move more product.

It’s just a complicated frackin’ problem – too much for a one-vendor problem. Storage, edit station, cabling & networking, asset mgmt. & workflow – all need to be addressed together.

*For the record, Bernard Lambourelle at Tiger-Tech did mention the vendor, but it just seemed simple enough at the time that I went it alone. Learn from my mistake!

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, MetaSAN, CatDV Server

[Jeffrey Lafrance]

Simon. I have an Infortrend JBOD with 16 1 TB SATA drives that will work. Let me know what speeds and feeds you need and I wil get these to my tech. Jeff LaFrance 952-253-6809 jlafrance@condre.com

[Clayton Jacobsen]

Just stumbled on this thread, we have 4 16 bay infortrend 4gb chassis. I have tested 16 disk RAID 0 128k & 512k stripes and have never really saturated the port. I get around 280 write, 350 ish read using AJA 1080 10bit, 8gb speed test.

I also get similar numbers as RAID5 and 8 disk RAID5 on the same unit.