HS San

[Bob Zelin]

Mr. Miller –
building a shared storage enviornment for a video facility is the most technically complicated task of all tasks in the professional video business. This is like trying to get you to understand Forier Transforms, or Advanced Chemistry by someone responding to you on a web forum. These questions cannot be answered by a silly article that I wrote, or some two paragraph answers that you get on these forums.
The best solution for you is to look into a turnkey solution from Apace Systems, or EditShare, etc. where a video dealer will come in and make things work. This is what most schools do. If you want to be the big hero, and show your department head that you can accomplish this for zero money, and build a complex shared video file sharing system for no money, you will fail.

I have dealt with countless IT departments -most of who know dramatically more about computers and networking than I do – and let me assure you, they just don’t grasp the concept of the bandwidth required to play back video streams across a network, with SUSTAINED PLAYBACK (no dropped frames).

Let me propose a quick test for you. Take two MAC’s. Plug in an ethernet cable between them. Turn file sharing on, on MAC # 1. Now, playback the video media from MAC 1 using MAC # 2. Look – it works ! OK, so now MAC # 2 is playing back video media on MAC # 1. Open FCP on MAC # 1, and play back the same media. Look – both MAC’s crash. Do you know why ? Show this to your IT department.
Ask them why this happens.

Companies like Apple have entire educational departments for XSAN, just to assist universities in
doing this type of task, for classroom enviornments. This process is not easy. It will not be answered in an article. It will not be answered in a user forum. If you don’t like these answers -well, that is too bad. You need HELP from a professional that does this for a living, and countless universities
have contracts with professsional dealers (both video and computer) that assist the school. You want to be the big hero by showing that you can make this happen, but you will fail.

The article that I wrote refers to Tiger Technology MetaLAN, but this is only one part of the equation, and this part is only $295 per FCP client – which is CHEAP. You need a managed switch, you need a server, you need drives, you need a RAID card, you need all of this configured correctly. In the process of figuring out how to do this correctly, I have failed over and over and over again, but kept at it to figure out all the right settings, all the right products, to make this work. It took a long time to figure out – and I had the help of experts.

There are countless companies that make wonderful Shared storage systems, at all kinds of prices. If you want a “free” system, you still need the knowlege of the details of how to do this. As I said before when you said that I was INSULTING YOU, if your IT techs can’t answer exactly what link aggregation is, and how to configure your network switch, you are simply wasting your time.

Bob Zelin

[Dave Barnard]

OpenFiler could indeed be used as an iSCSI target storage device
The free SNS GlobalSAN could be used to connect to it
All you would need then is suitable SAN software eg from SNS or Tiger

However, even with a lot of time available you would probably not get a reliable working system, even if your team includes ninja networking gurus, eg https://www.snsforums.com/index.php?showtopic=221

If you have a real need for a shared storage system, try to find the budget to get it done by professionals, preferably in your local area.

Dave Barnard
cinedigital
london, UK

[Sean Oneil]

[Chris Miller] “f that fails, well I will search for something cheaper/ free. I did find this free software incase all else fails. It is linux based, would someone mind telling me if they think it would work, I will ahve ALOT of time to tinker with it to make it work.

Link: https://www.openfiler.com/“

Chris,

You’re getting terrible advice. You think going with Openfiler is free just because it’s free to download???? Think again. iSCSI is no different than fibre channel. It’s not network file sharing – it’s a real SAN. In other words you can’t share a drive with multiple clients unless you have expensive software like Xsan or MetaSAN managing the write permissions. At the very least you’ll need to spend $600 per client for MetaSAN. This is far more expensive than MetaLAN (from the same company).

That said, it won’t work anyways. Openfiler does not work well with GlobalSAN AT ALL. I say that from first hand experience.

The least expensive option is using Apple File Sharing using a real Mac as a server, a managed switch, and an IT expert who knows how to tune the TCP settings and the network environment for video editing. This is essentially what Walter and Bob’s articles are about.

Sean

[Chris Miller]

Ok ok ok, I KNOW I do know what I am doing, I have only been POINTED in the right direction by an IT guy, I DO NOT have as much help as you all think. I am looking into getting either MetaSAN or MetaLAN.

Now I will ask, which one of the two should I use? I got the Hardware setup from Mr. Zelin’s article (which was very informative)and I will have three months to tinker with the software once the school year ends and this budget gets approved. So which should I use?

[Chris Miller]

There may be a change in plans. We found a partial turnkey solution. We may invest in a SATABoy (that is what the company reccomended we use over their other more expensive products) with a few alike things to the previous systems. Anyone here familular with Sata boy?

[Sean Oneil]

[Chris Miller] “I am looking into getting either MetaSAN or MetaLAN.

Now I will ask, which one of the two should I use? I got the Hardware setup from Mr. Zelin’s article”

MetaSAN is not for the hardware in that article. MetaSAN is for fibre or iSCSI.

Sean

[Chris Blair]

From what I read about it on Nexsan’s website, you’d still need file-sharing software if you want to share files between and among the Final Cut workstations.

Are you sure you understand the differences in how SAN, ISCSI, AoE (Sata over ethernet) work compared to NAS (Network area storage) works? The first three use what’s called block level access, which doesn’t incorporate a file system. That’s part of the reason it’s so fast. The drawback is you need 3rd party software to manage the files for you and it’s usually fairly expensive.

With NAS based solutions, you just use the native file-sharing of whatever OS you’re workstations are using, so while you sacrifice some speed and overhead (due to using ethernet and the OS’s file sharing architecture), you don’t need third party software. But a NAS should be plenty fast enough for editing DV footage when configured properly.

I had problems understanding the differences when we were researching all this 18 months ago, but slowly it sunk in, and we opted for a NAS based system and we’re editing DVCPro50 quality stuff across 4 workstations.

Hope that helps.

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

[Sean Oneil]

[Chris Miller] “There may be a change in plans. We found a partial turnkey solution. We may invest in a SATABoy (that is what the company reccomended we use over their other more expensive products) with a few alike things to the previous systems. Anyone here familular with Sata boy?”

It’s a storage array that the vendor can configure as fibre or iSCSI. There are dozens, if not hundreds of similar products.

If it’s fibre, it will probably work fine but there’s still no guarantee. You’ll also need fibre channel cards for every mac, plus a switch. You’ll also need the full version of MetaSAN for each client (not the price-reduced iSCSI-only version). This is a very expensive option comparatively. But I’m guessing you want the iSCSI option, in which case you will have serious problems. GlobalSAN is untested on the vast majority of iSCSI target products and will likely either perform poorly or simply not work at all. Chances are it runs Linux or Solaris, so you will have problems. Small Tree sells a Mac iSCSI initiator, but there’s no guarantee that will work either unless they’ve tested it themselves.

On top of that, the RAID controller has probably not been tested to run a RAID formatted with the HFS file system. That probably doesn’t matter, but it’s still an unknown. These things are extremely complex and something simple like that could cause a major problem if nobody’s bothered to test it using a Mac client.

I don’t know the price but I’m sure the Sataboy still costs a few thousand at least. Add a switch and six licenses of MetaSAN to that and you’re spending a decent chunk of money for something that is completely untested for Mac clients – let alone video editing. Among the community of customers who run Macs, you’ll probably be the only one. Look at the message board on the SNS website. Look how many dozens of iSCSI products people have problems working with Globalsan. And look at the Xsanity forum and see how many problems people have with random fibre switches and other products.

For a lot less money you can do a non-SAN AFP file sharing setup like in Walter Biscardi’s article using the cheapest Mac Pro as a server. Again, this option is CHEAPER than the Sataboy iSCSI solution. You don’t need MetaSAN at all (read Chris Blair’s reply). Or use MetaLan, which is a similar solution except that it uses a Windows server instead of a Mac.

Sean

[Chris Blair]

I think what everyone is trying to say is that hundreds if not thousands of people have tried to take various hardware, from fast SATA drives, switches and ethernet or fibre channel cards, and configure them in a way that allows them to share files for video editing.

A lot of them probably succeeded in getting them hooked up properly and even getting blazing fast test results from data throughput testing software. But then….they tried to actually open NLE projects on different workstations and share footage and read and write simultaneously. It didn’t work. It almost never works. I’m no engineer, but I read many horror stories while researching this. So many that we spent our money ($15,000) on a turnkey solution that was proven in the field by demanding broadcast pros. (Apace vStor)

There are even stories of people buying allegedly turnkey systems from fringe companies (which I won’t name but have been called out in this forum a few times) that simply don’t work. One of those companies somehow convinced PC Mall and Mac Mall to sell their supposedly turnkey shared video editing products. How…I don’t know. Likely no one actually tested it to see if it worked. Because the one or two people that did try it (and posted on here) confirmed it did not.

So what everybody is saying is, “if you try to build it yourself, follow…TO THE LETTER…other people’s instructions.” They’ve done the trial and error for you. Don’t make the mistakes that they’ve already made figuring this stuff out.

That way…you’ve got a good chance of making a DIY system work. If you don’t follow somebody else’s cue, you have almost no chance of it working correctly. The other option is to buy a turnkey system that’s made specifically for video editing and is proven. If your school has $4000 to spend as you indicated, it’s probably not enough to do this correctly. A good quality gigabit switch is going to cost you $600-800 alone. We spent almost $750 on ethernet cabling because we had to upgrade a lot of existing cabling from old category 5, and we only configured 4 edit workstations. We spent about $350 on racks because we had nothing to hold the drive arrays (they’re big and heavy) or the rack mounted backup drives we bought. We spent about $1500 paying an IT company to come in and install, do basic configuration and setup all the workstations with the correct static IPs, replace the old, outdated cabling and such. We could’ve done all that, but it would’ve taken me 3 or 4 days wheras it took them a day and a half.

Anyway…everybody on the group is trying to help you…not admonish you or make you feel dumb. As I said a few days ago..you’re VERY forward thinking…especially for being in high school. You’ll appreciate everybody’s admonitions if you follow the advice and end up with a working system. Then…you WILL be a hero!

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

[Chris Miller]

Ok… Now I will admit I am a bit confused… I just had my brain blasted with math homework… I will discuss this plan with my teacher and my friend who is helping me and I will post what we think we should do, then you guys can chew it up and spit it out and tell me what to do. Then once I get the software, and hardware. I will built the stuff and then for setup you guys eat me again…

Hardware wise:
We do not need a rack for this thing, its easier to just get a full tower with acoustic dampening and stoe it in a closet (which has an AC in it?! … no one know why…)
Managed Hub umm … 750? I found this : https://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=551386&sku=T156-2126

Its managed… Would it work?

We will have 3 months to tinker with this system this summer! The district trusts me enough to let me in… wow I am lame spending the summer at school… Well I do love the TV studio… and technology… + i may get paid to set this up…

Thanks for all the help… I honestly thank you all.. and I will follow all of your advice to a T.