Isilon for Video Archive? Edit?

[Jason Myres]

Although I have not used Isilon in a day-to-day environment myself, I have heard nothing but good things about it. Volume management and expansion are very elegant from what I hear, and if you factor in what your hourly time is worth, in the long run, I’ve found it’s always better to go with a smart solution with greater up-front costs, than a bargain-basement solution, that quietly nickel and dimes you to death over it’s lifetime in administration and productivity costs.

I see companies using Isilon more and more as a SAN alternative. The company where a good friend of mine works, is on the brink of replacing their aging V1.4.2 Xsan with a large Isilon installation. That being said, it is not a SAN replacement. You have to remember it’s a well-designed, intelligent NAS, but nothing more. An Xsan/ StorNext installation will smoke it in terms of per client bandwidth (400+ MB/s), aggregate bandwidth (1,500+ MB/s), scalability (2PB), and real, file-level locking across several (64), simultaneous users.

That being said, the advent of ProRes (27.5 MB/s) and other bandwidth-friendly formats has made it so that a Formula One-caliber SAN is not as necessary as it once was, when we were all staring down the barrel of having to use Uncompressed HD (150+ MB/s per stream) if we wanted to output high-quality work.

If you carefully manage your work flow, and do not overcome Isilon’s bandwidth limitations, than you will enjoy a lot of it’s benefits. You will need to have a plan, however, if the day comes that you need greater per client bandwidth. Also, keep in mind, all of the components that go into an Xsan or StorNext system (servers, RAIDs, switches) are all able to be re-purposed in a myriad of different ways if your needs change. If you do decide to buy an Isilon, just remember, that is all it will ever be.

JM

[David Gagne]

Thanks for the input. For bandwidth, we may continue to have a smaller footprint SAN unless Isilon can meet that need. I know that as your storage grows, generally so does your bandwidth, as each node adds 2 more gigabit connections to your storage. I believe it has some sort of round-robin scheme for spreading clients out over these connections. Still you won’t get the same speeds that you would get over fiber on a single machine until 10GigE comes out.
I know if you have more clients than nodes and you are running into congestion you can add more performance accelerator nodes if you need more bandwidth.

One thing I’ve also considered is as we grow we may want to ditch our fiber infrastructure for the flexibility of ethernet… in the short term I think keeping our 20TB XSAN is smart.

[Bob Zelin]

1) 28MB/sec is not enough, as no one just uses one video stream of ProRes422HQ. Most ethernet based solutions on the market today (EditShare, Maxx Digital, SNS, Apace, MetaLAN, Small Tree, etc) will do 90MB/sec.

2) 10 Gigabit ethernet is out. Most people don’t want to spend $40,000 for a 16 terabyte solution (unless you are used to paying for XSAN and Fibre channel). A 20 port 10 Gig CAT 6A switch is $15,000, and this does not include your storage, or client 10 Gig cards for your MAC’s. This is in contrast to a $1200 link agg GigE switch.

As always, it’s all about money.

If you want to build a 10 Gig solution right now, I can tell you how to do it.

Bob Zelin

[David Gagne]

1) I know 28MB/s isn’t enough for edit. Our XSAN currently does 90MB/s easy even though it’s 90% full (crazy editors!). I’m pretty sure our performance will be much better when we don’t have full luns.
2) 10GigE may be out, but most main-line solutions do not support it yet. Isilon says it will be out sometime this winter for them. I don’t have as much trouble with the price really (we’re ready to spend six figures), but my priority right now is capacity, not bandwidth. Eventually I may want to upgrade to 10GigE however, and I’d like to be forward compatible…

Again, our situation is that we need capacity, and our bandwidth is fine on our existing XSAN — I’m more curious to see how Isilon performs to see if it can eventually be a replacement for XSAN or not.

[Bob Zelin]

David –
if capacity is your only issue, then BUY MORE DRIVES. What is the problem. You said that 6 figures is not an issue for you – then SPEND SOME MONEY and buy another storage array. Guess what ? As our lovely industry becomes 100% tapeless (which is happening overnight) – you and your company, will continue to buy MORE storage arrays until the day that your boss decides to go out of business. Buying more drives will be your fate until you decide to become a bus driver. Fact of life.

Bob Zelin