Best storage & workflow solution for small production company

[Jon Schilling]

Pascal,

Right forum, but for what you want to do, it’s one or the other.
Affordable or Powerful. That I know of, having both would be a tough call.

Of course much of the answer to your question would be to define your budget, as to the affordability end of your requirement.

You mentioned sharing the video footage & making it accessible to every Mac in your office. Doing so at any appreciable speed is going to cost money.

Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
Proavio Storage by Enhance Technology Inc.
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com

[Alex Gerulaitis]

I second Jon that the first step is to define the budget and requirements, although to even start thinking about a budget, it helps to know what the choices are.

NAS vs. SAN: NAS is more affordable, less rigid, less complicated – so let’s look at NAS.

Assuming video bitrates under 1Gbs (ProRes, H264, MPEG, etc. – no uncompressed HD), and four simultaneous editing sessions each working with one video stream, the aggregate bandwidth the NAS must sustain is roughly 4Gbs.

The ingredients for such a NAS are:
– a box holding the motherboard and 8+ drive bays
– 4+ 1GbE ports with link aggregation capability, possibly with an option to add 10GbE ports later on
– a decent switch that also supports link aggregation and possibly 10GbE add-on modules
– Linux Storage Server (or custom flavor of it)
– Drives

The above BOM (bill of materials) is less than $2K diskless and around $4-5K for 24TB – both without Linux, purely for the hardware.

Synology and QNAP will charge around $3-4K for a diskless appliance and will not support anything related to editing. (Been there, tried that.) I also don’t know of any good VAR that uses Synology and QNAP or other general purpose NAS products for editing.

Then there are people like Maxx and GB Labs who sell and support NAS servers specifically for editing – and they charge for it.

GB Labs Space, for instance, costs over $20K for a 24TB box meeting above requirements. Not sure about Maxx – probably in the same ballpark. GB Labs Space NAS is an amazing piece of tech though, scalable to 10+ simultaneous editing sessions with high bandwidth video streams.

So the choices are, as of today, a roughly $5K NAS appliance that is not supported for editing, or a $20K+ NAS or SAN that is.

I am not sure if this helps – but figured I’d share my findings with you. 🙂

The ingredients are simple and relatively affordable, it’s the cooking that costs.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Bob Zelin]

my suggestion is to find a dealer that is qualified in your region, to work with you to accomplish this. There is no cheap solution for what you want to do. Anyone on these forums can sell you a system, but you will need support – probably local support, especially when you get started. I can only assume that you must have a local pro video dealer that can assist you with this. There are many good brands of shared storage, but it all means nothing without support.

Bob Zelin

[Pascal Greuter]

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, I am aware of the costs. I work for a small TV station and we have a SAN that costs roughly 200k and it works perfect but it’s obviously too much for a small company with 5 Macs.

I have no budget yet, I’m just in the process of checking out what’s out in the market. I think our scenario is very common and maybe there is kind of a “standard solution” for requirements like we have.

[Pascal Greuter]

Bob, thanks for replying. I read a lot about the Maxx Digital 10Gig Final Share. There are quite a few nice reviews online and I thought that a solution like this may be the right choice for us. Do you have a local dealer in Switzerland or Germany or do you sell it outside of the US? Maybe we can talk about prices, delivery and support via Email.

I know at least 3 companies in Switzerland who have experience in this area but I wanted to do some research, before I get in touch with them.

I am totally aware that this will cost a few bucks. And we didn’t even talked about a backup solution…

It would be nice, if we could stay in contact about this.

[Pascal Greuter]

Hi Alex

Thank you very much for your detailed infos. It helped me a lot especially that you pointed out the differences between a NAS and a SAN solution. I think a NAS is to simple and not reliable enough for what we want to achieve.

Thanks!
Pascal

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Pascal Greuter] “I think a NAS is to simple and not reliable enough for what we want to achieve.”

Can’t say I agree with that assessment but glad I could help:
– Maxx Digital Final Share 10G is a NAS
– GB Labs Space is a NAS
– complexity is the No. 1 enemy of reliability
– SAN (in its video-related sense, not General IT) – was and is a “hack” to bypass Ethernet and TCP/IP limitations, that are much less limiting these days vs. 5 years ago.

For video related purposes, there is no question for me that the future is in NAS, for collaborative editing.

Bob Zelin’s support for Maxx Digital Final Share is the perfect indication of it. 🙂

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Pascal Greuter]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “Can’t say I agree with that assessment but glad I could help:”

I see what you mean and I think I was a bit too quick with my reply. I definitely need to do some further research and learn the differences between NAS and SAN.

Cheers!

[Bob Zelin]

https://www.vidsharx.com/

This is David Norden’s company in Sweden. I was surprised to see that he doesn’t have direct contact info on his new website. Before you consider Final Share, try to see what David can offer you locally. I realize that this is not in Switzerland, but it’s closer than I am.

Alex recommended GB Labs.
https://www.gblabs.com/about/

they are in England. You should look at them too.
If you don’t like the response you get from either of these two companies, please write back on this forum.

Bob Zelin

[Rainer Wirth]

I would recommend a SAN network, server, FC Raid (Small tree, Dulce, Sonnet or Axus) and find a local dealer with professional support. Also I would’t mix Windows and Mac.

Cheers

Rainer