Fiber Channel Shared Network solution for FCP

[Bob Zelin]

this is not a solution. This is a fibre drive array. Everyone sells fibre drive arrays. What is your real question – wait – I know what your real question is – ISNT THERE A CHEAPER WAY TO DO THIS. You sound like the guy who first bought an Apple XServe RAID, and thought he could do shared storage without doing anything else.

Chris – do you know what you need – you need a SOLUTION. Solutions are sold by countless companies, many of which post on this forum. Solutions are sold by dealers. Solutions are put together by knuckleheads like me, Shane Sokowlsky, Eric Hansen, Jordan Woods, and others. Turnkey dealer solutions come from people like Dan Hatch, who can sell you a working Apace System. There are teriffic solutions from Editshare, Facilis Terrablock, Maximum Throughput, Wyler Ferguson’s Charismac FibreShare, and others.

You don’t have the knowlege to build your own SAN. Just because you found a “cool” fibre array does not mean that you know all the crap you have to go thru to make it work. You know what the most important feature of a SAN system is – THE PERSON WHO IS GOING TO ASSIST YOU TO MAKE IT WORK with your equipment.

You have great people on this forum, making all kinds of good valid suggestions. Even if you see people say the occational “this product sucks” – all these products have their pluses and minuses – they all work. But you know what doesn’t work? A bargin basement soultion that you pieced together without knowing what to do. You need help. This forum is great for suggestions, and banter, but you need someone to help you do this job. Hopefully a dealer or SAN guy in your area, that can come over, and help you install it and get it working. And hey – if he is good, he can use the Fibre array that you found and posted .

Bob Zelin

[Chris Baldwin]

well gosh…

so I did get a “solution” quote built for me from Promax and a similar company up here in San Fran. these are just the raw parts that i’ve listed.

So my question still is …

Is this solution a good one? and Is it going to be outdated by the new 8Gb cards? And even if it doesn’t get outdated is it going drop in price iminately as another poster mentioned?

Because its so expensive I’ve been thinkning about leasing the equipment for 3-5 years. Do people think that would be wise? Is this going to be a dead weight investment in 5 years or will it still be suitable?

Thanks,

Chris

[Chris Blair]

I can’t answer your first question about “is this a good solution.” But I can answer the second one. It will be outdated probably 6 months after you buy it. Anything you buy will be.

That’s not the issue. The issue is: will it solve my current problems (whatever they are), and will it do it for the term of my investment. Just about any computer based product has little or no value on the open market after 5 years. A non-linear edit system bought 5 years ago for $20,000 might be worth $1000 if you’re lucky today.

If you’re an established company, I see NO advantage to leasing. Leasing typically means higher interest and some sort of deposit up-front, plus the fees the leasing company charges to broker the deal.

With a loan, you’ll have a lower interest rate and require little or no money down, and have little or no fees to pay for setting up the deal. Either way, you’re borrowing money to buy the thing, so there’s not much difference beyond the issues above.

And if you can get into a SAN solution that does HD for under $20k…I’d say that’s doing pretty darn well.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Daniel Hatch]

Chris,

Who are you dealing with over at ProMax?

You can also consider Apace’s vStor network storage system for collaborative editing in support of your three FCPs.
The advantage with this approach is that it is via multi-GE or even can be 10GE that is IP based Ethernet and all the workspace collaboration is done at the file level and at the operating system level. So you do not need any SAN management software to do FCP collaboration. There’s no need to pay the XSAN tax per seat or equivalent.

Also there is no need for metadata server for SAN nor setting up fibre channel for your workgroup. Also if you want to add powerful notebooks for editing to your set there is no SAN fibre connection for those.
vStor is as easy to manage as a server and as it has a browser interface you can access it from anywhere in the world.
Apace also has media asset management and other tools that can help you maximize management and access to your data if you elect to down the road. And if you want to connect any PC or Linux or Unix nodes to your workgroup it is interoperable with them and can support all other video or graphics apps.

Hope this helps, FWIW you can call Apace and they will do a webex to show you their inter face.

Dan Hatch

[Chris Blair]

I’ll second Dan’s recommendation. We own a vStor and while we only use if for SD work, it does everything they say it will and their customer service and understanding of how video editing works is outstanding.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Ohannis Dikramanjian]

Hi Chris,
As many people mentioned, there are many solutions out there that can do the job. You have to make sure that you have the support of the dealer that sells you the solution.

Regarding the 8Gb fiber Atto, Qlogic have fiber cards and switch that is 8Gb the only questions remains is the storage capable of the delivering more bandwidth. in many cases you will not see much performance difference between 8Gb and 4Gb with a single storage array, it will increase the performance with a Pool of arrays.

On a long term if you invest into an 8Gb fiber switch and the SAN software the rest can be upgraded as you go in the future (Such as HBA’s and storage).

One more solution to look into is the Tiger MetaSan, it is a great software and a small SAN solution.

If you are interested to get some more feedback you can call me at 818-242-4996 x 112.

-Ohannis

Ohannis Dikramanjian
818-242-4996 x 112
ohannis@nlesystems.com
http://www.nlesystems.com

[Bob Zelin]

Chris –
this is my opinion based on your comments. You should not buy a SAN. The very fact that you are STILL dealing with ProMax for this, and the very fact that you are unaware that ALL OF THIS EQUIPMENT will be useless in 3-5 years, means that you have no clue about the current state of technology. You should not buy anything.

The MAC G5’s are going to be useless this year, when OS-X 10.6 comes out, which will not run on older MAC G5’s. Hitachi is about to release 4 Terabyte single drives. And yes, ATTO has an 8Gig Fibre card. Just 2 years ago, the 4Gig cards came out. Apple XServe RAID’s are now no longer supported by Apple. Current “hot products” – even ones that I recommend – will be USELESS in 5 years. That’s the business we are in. The days of buying a Beta VTR, and making it last for 10 years (and make money with it) are OVER. $80,000 AVID Meridian systems are worthless. AJA Kona 2 cards have rapidly evolved into AJA Kona 3 cards, making the whole PCI-X series totally outdated. Blackmagic doesnt’ even sell PCIX products anymore.

These hard facts give everyone (including me) new ulcers on a monthly basis. I don’t like it – no one likes it – but that’s the business. If you think I am being a smart ass, or “breaking your chops” – I am not making this stuff up. It’s a hard business to be in. If you don’t want to sweat along with the rest of us, then don’t join the club. To get in, you will spend a lot of money, and then it will become outdated. Your only goal is to make as much money with this technology as quickly as you can, before it becomes obsolete.

All the products mentioned (Apace, MetaSAN, etc) are all excellent products.

bob Zelin

[Ian Karr]

Chris,

As you can see, we are all 100% committed to helping each other, and sometimes the best help is to say “don’t do anything yourself”, as Bob has recommended.

I’d probably go with Bob’s advice. There are way too many things that can go wrong…or partly wrong. Knowledgeable professionals will set you up right the first time…and when you consider how much time they’ll save you, they’re a great value. Forget about obsolescence. We’re all obsolete anyway.

There are definitely advantages to shared storage, so if you’re company is growing and/or you’re wasting a lot of time copying stuff over to external drives, it can be great. We put our first SAN in 8 years ago and have never looked back.

The 20k seems steep for a do-it-yourself deal. For the same money you can install a TURNKEY solution and have it supported by people who know their *&%t.

If you’re really masochistic and decide to do it yourself, you’ll save a lot of money buying the Qlogic switch, the SFPs and the HBAs on ebay. Hey…as long as you’re up for some punishment, you might as well take a chance on used gear!

Back to your initial question….

It is possible to set up a simple volume-level SAN using the equipment and software you described (although I think you’ll need more SFPs). Here’s the general order of what you’d need to do, which will ideally scare you off and give you a better idea of why Bob said what he said….

1) Run fiber optic cable from the switch to each suite in your facility and equip each mac with a fibre channel card.

2) Set up and build your array using whatever level RAID you like. If you ever work with uncompressed HD you’ll need to use RAID 0 (which offers no redundancy), RAID 5 (which offers some protection at the expense of some speed and storage space) or RAID 50, which is basically two RAID 5 arrays that are software-striped together. This is a good safety-performance compromise. If you want RAID 50 –which is what we use– you’ll need to set up two arrays, each with half of the drives in your box. Array 1 would be directed to FC port 0, Array 2 to FC port 1. Then you’ll need to create separate LUNs on each array that equal the number of partitions you want to end up with. For example, if you have 3 suites and you want each suite to have its own partition, you’d create 3 LUNs on each array. So there would be six total LUNs…3 pointed to FC port 0, 3 pointed to FC port 1. Consult the manual for how to access the interface on the array box to do all this. 😉

3) Once the arrays have been properly configured, connect a mac to the box using the fiber optic cable(s), open Disk Utility and create the software stripe. Grab one LUN from Group 1 and one from Group 2 and stripe them together in the RAID submenu. Make sure you’re pairing these LUNs up, or you won’t be getting the highest throughput. The newly-created RAID 50 partition should come online and mount. Repeat for as many LUNs as you have.

4) Configure and zone your FC switch. This really separates the pros from everyone else. You’ll need to assign two ports to your storage and set up zones between each channel of storage and each channel on your mac(s). Again, check the manual to see how to configure your switch. 😉 Connect the storage and each mac to the switch.

5) Install SanMP admin, convert the RAID 50 partitions to SanMP partitions and add user names and passwords.

6) Install SanMP client on each machine connected to the storage

7) Come to the realization you probably should have had a professional help you!

Seriously, it IS possible to do it yourself, but prepare to be frustrated and spend a lot of time before it’s all working perfectly. Good luck!!!

Ian

[Matt Geier]

Chris,

Matt here from Small Tree.

I almost chimed in last night when I first saw this, but I wanted to sleep on it.

Bob is right of course too!

What you’ve indicated that you want to do can be done with Gigabit or 10Gb Ethernet, which will save you a lot of cost overall. Maybe using Fibre Channel on your Storage is okay, but there’s no need to run an entire infrastructure like that. It’s too expensive!

You want to be careful and make sure that you balance the network bandwidth when you’re trying to do editing in real time over Ethernet. You need to make sure your video editing clients are going to have enough bandwidth to the server, and then also have enough storage bandwidth to get the entire use out of the network when they are editing.

I personally would like to talk with you on the phone about your project and explain to you what Small Tree can supply that would help your work flow go faster.

There are some additional details that would be needed.

Is there a time we can talk?

Matt G –
651-209-6509 x 1

Matt G.

[Chris Baldwin]

WOW!!!

Actually I’m writing in to say thanks to everyone for their feedback and thoughts…

I can’t say I’m anymore convinced of a solution at the moment but I’m more educated now which is why I started the thread in the cow.

My main motivation is to stop wasting time transferring media from one external to another and trying to manage multiple projects on different computers with different local storage solutions.

My second desire is to speed up encoding and compressing time with whatever the options are for group network processing.

I’m well aware of the equipment not being the state of the art past a handful of years of purchase but I certainly want to make sure I’m not buying a technology that only serves the powerpc macs out there instead of the intel macs or that since I’m new to researching the post solutions that there isn’t some drastically different tide to industry is about to take. It sounds like 8Gb is the next step and really its the same solution but just more bandwidth.

As far as putting these solutions myself and maintaining them myself…
Forget it! I’m a shooter and and editor NOT a backend tech savy IT guy… I need a solution that is simple(mac simple) and is supported if need be.

Again thanks for all the feedback and I’ll be contacting a few of you who offered a more one on one consultation. Wish there was a provider here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Thanks,

Chris