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G5 Xserve, G5 Mac Pro, no raid… Fiber Channel?
Greetings Everyone!
I spoke to an apple tech the other day and they assured me it was impossible to connect our G5 Xserve to our G5 Mac Pro in order to access shared drives on the server. Why would you even want to do that you may ask? Well, the company I work for wanted to set up a FCP edit suite with some extra storage. But somewhere along the purchasing path they opted for the Xserve instead of the Xserve Raid. So while I may have over a terabyte of internal space in the server… it really doesn’t do me much good at Uncompressed 10-bit. Which is pretty much all we are working with.
We tried the Gbit ethernet route… it worked for a while but upon the slightest cough of fragmentation (YES drives extremely full and speeds affected at times) our ETT die and we are hosed to repeat while turning audio rendering to less tracks, disabling video output, closing sequences, etc. or just moving it to an internal drive on the Mac Pro.
And sorry to leave out we are using a Blackmagic Multibridge Pro for I/O, and always dig’ing and outputing to a Sony DVW-M2000.
We had our server running directly to a switch with the Mac Pro on the other end, also a connection to our servers going to the switch for an active internet connection.
Did try Aggregate Linking, or bonded ethernet, but our router was crap and didn’t support it. Kept getting “Wrong Group” in the system pref for network on the server and mac pro when I was going through the router… but hooked directly to each other the bonded junx worked… just not sure how well since my speedtests didn’t seem to increase, probably capping out the internal SATA drives in the server…
So where we are now? I’m not sure. The intention got far detached from the most optimal path for achieving what we’re after… I just wanted to be able to have more disk space, that would handle 30MB/s sustained. We are mostly working with audio, four channels and sometimes 6 mixed to 4, and some video fixes here and there, but also mostly just a single video track, no effects, no correction.
I even was told to hook up the Xserve directly to the Mac Pro with FW800… A $6,000 external drive? With dual xeons? Are you kidding? I did it. It didn’t work. There is no raid array in our xserve. It was slower than the Gbit Ethernet.
I don’t know what to do. Oh yeah! So my original question!
Why couldn’t we install a Fiber Channel card in the Xserve and the Mac Pro and have them share over AFP? Wouldn’t that lend the ability to add a REAL external RAID at some point? If I had a XServe, a Mac Pro, and a External Raid, wouldn’t they all need FC? Would I really need a switch then? What the heck.
-Micah
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3 Replies
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Wow I can’t believe you’ve had good results capturing this way! Hmmm… I can report marginal results from long ago playing back DV video over GigE, sharing a mounted RAID 0 on a 1TB DAS, (Poor mans SAN), but never Uncompressed 10-bit! Yikes!
If you were to connect the MacPro and XServe directly via Fibre, is there even a protocol to initiate communication? Good question. If you could, are the drives RAID’ed together on the XServe?
Are your MacPro drive slots fully populated? If not, to quickly get you past this project buy some internal drives and RAID them 0, export a QT of your final piece to your new internal RAID and output from your internal drives.
Time for a new HD system – must be Spring…
j
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Trying to do this with uncompressed is pretty hardcore. Here are some tips:
– Make sure Jumbo Frames is on. It has to be enabled on both ends, as well as the switch.
– Make sure hardware Flow Control is on. Again, both ends as well as the switch. Flow Control will actually slow your throughput, but throughput is more consistent and stable (meaning less dropped frames).
– Don’t even use a switch if you don’t have to.
– Run Leopard, not Tiger. The TCP stack is newer, better, and faster. And it uses a newer version of AFP.
Those things will improve your status quo, but honestly, AFP is probably not going to work well no matter what you do. Uncompressed is too demanding. Final Cut runs a ridiculous amount of background services during Log & Capture that makes it choke at the slightest hiccup. And it’s even worse for Edit To Tape.
You could try the Blackmagic Capture Utility. That might be better.
Sean
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[Micah Fitzkee] “If I had a XServe, a Mac Pro, and a External Raid, wouldn’t they all need FC? Would I really need a switch then? What the heck.”
What the heck is what tech support personnel will be saying about what you are trying to do. FC uses SCSI protocols that I am pretty sure would not work the way you want them to. You will be spending a minimum of $1200 on FC HBAs and cables to get something that probably will not work. Why do that when you can buy a 1TB G raid that will give you 60MB/s plus bandwidth of DAS and avoid pain of trying to duct tape a system together. Dump the Xserve buy an eSATA or FW800 RAID.
For clarity in communication G5s are Power Macs not Mac Pros.
Good Luck
Matt
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