Mobile shared editing storage

[Eric Hansen]

[Kannan Raghavan] “With the Small Tree TitaniumZ-5, you just hook up the MBPs with a ethernet cable, right? “

Yup. The first time you use it, you have to set it up (which Small Tree support can guide you through, if you need). But after that, it’s plug and play over ethernet.

During my testing, I was getting 600MB/s read and write over 10GbE. So there’s plenty of bandwidth for a laptop or 2 to be writing to the RAID while a few read from the RAID on their 1GbE connections.

My client has had his for 6-9 months. If you want, I could put you in touch with him and he can give you his field-tested experience with it.

Thanks

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Duncan Beattie]

Hi Kannan

Many thanks for your interest. The Mini comes with a single 4 port 1GBe card allowing you to connect up to four direct devices or bond to a switch. We can deliver up to 116Mb/Sec over GBe allowing you to pull 4 streams of ProRes 422 HQ 25, for example. We also have options for 10Gbe in the Mini.

A worldwide news agency has over 50 of our systems and they use the Mini for their journalists in the field, to ingest and edit, producing over 700 hours of broadcast for London 2012.

The Mini will deliver over the network, at maximum simultaneous peak, 10 streams of 422 HQ 25. This is 10 streams of independent media being pulled at exactly the same second. If you add in stop start editing and media sharing then real world performance is higher but difficult to quantify. That being said Performance has never been an issue for our systems. This is reason our solutions were developed in 2006. High speed open NAS.

In your environment capturing a stream will normally use the equivalent of 2 write streams however we have technology in our systems that allow switching between Editing and Production modes to prevent cache dumps to disk.

The Mini also has options for Mirrored OS Disk, Dual PSU and DC Power. It fits great in a Peli case so can travel as luggage on airlines.

If you go to this page and click on the tab at the bottom you will see the performance figures for the Mini.
https://www.gblabs.co.uk/products/Mini_Space/

I hope this helps.

yours

Duncan

Duncan Beattie
Global Product Manager
GB Labs LLP
duncan (@) gblabs.co.uk
http://www.gblabs.co.uk

[David Glass]

Thanks Duncan, and thanks everyone for the advice.

[Kevin Rag]

Thanks a lot Eric. It’d be great to find out from an end user before I actually write a check.
I really like the Titanium Z5, just got a quote from a local reseller too.

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Steve Modica]

I just have to add a reply and say I love Bob’s posts 🙂

As for thunderbolt networking, I had it setup for Kaku Ito in Japan so he could fly to Hawaii and take pictures of stars with 3 macs. It seemed to be working fine, but it was not quite as intuitive as I thought it would be (it bridged automatically and we had to edit the bridge and fiddle around to make it the way we wanted).

I’d like to say all of these vendors (including Small Tree) spend time working on performance, video editing and all the ancillary things that go with that (meta-data, sharing, latency, scaling, cross platform compatibility). For the most part, we aren’t just plugging crap together. There’s some promise of performance and functionality.

We spend time patching drivers and kernels, looking at how the apps like to read, and measuring latency to make sure things will work correctly (like FCP X and NFS, which seems to be a thing now).

I realize we seem more expensive, but we do an awful lot of work before we can get a box out the door and claim it works.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Kevin Rag]

Thanks for the info Duncan. I’m looking into three similar systems to find the right fit for my needs:)

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.