Networking Editing Computers

[Matt Geier]

Steve,

I read Bob’s response to this and I wanted to address the part he could not.

You Write –
If I am only connecting 3 machines to the server, do I really need to combine the 4 port Ethernet card outputs to a managed Ethernet switch? Is there any problem in just connecting each machine to a port and giving each the 1Ghz bandwidth, and connecting using AFP?

Reply –
You can skin the cat many ways and some of this depends on your own plans to grow the network. If you don’t have any growth to plan on, you can use just a Small Tree nic in your server, and directly connect your clients as Jumbo Frames to the network adapter.

If you have plans to add additional servers with more storage, or additional editing clients beyond what you are set up for, you’ll need a the switch to do add editors. Otherwise you can only grow the network to whatever port count you have direct at the server.

**** I’d also like to point out that your edit clients would connect via Gigabit which will be able to give them 90MB of bandwidth over their wire. – I’m mentioning this because you stated 1Ghz, which is Gigahertz and is a processor speed, not Gigabit Ethernet.

You Write –
At a push CAN the server mac pro be used for viewing/ ingesting or does it HAVE to be left alone?

Reply –
You SHOULD be leaving the server alone. This is also NOT recommended as Bob stated. In a smaller environment, this won’t be as big of concern as it would be in a larger environment, granted, mostly because of the communication going on inside your office amongst yourselves. However, in order for the solution to “always work optimally” you would NOT use the server for anything other then serving.

The reality is you want the server doing what it was configured and designed to do – serve – if your network needs designed to do more then that, it should be implemented as such. The server is there to manage the connections of clients, switch and the storage reads/writes.

Often time’s if you have this plan in your head, you’d be in a position to use direct attach storage on one of your editing clients and ingest at those, then afp move the files to the centralized storage. (You can move this data up to 90MB/sec using Gigabit Jumbo Frames and up to 130MB or faster using a 10Gb connection)

An alternative to the suggestion above, is to invest in a Mac Pro to be used as an ingest station, hook it into the network with 10gb or 1gb using Jumbo Frames, and ingest directly to the Centralize Storage, making it available to the clients that have access to the storage.

Does this help you clear your questions up?

Regards,

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1

[Rob Brambila]

[Bob Zelin] “I have called around to get ideas from some of the companies on networking: Apple and ProMax to start.

REPLY – your first mistake.”

Wow, Bob. With all due respect, I believe the ethernet solution is the first one that we suggested. (We being ProMAX.) We have set up multiple systems this way and I agree with you, it is stable and robust.

[Bob Zelin] “See Ray – it DOES work – stop asking dealers whose only concern is to get $50,000 from you.”

Again, with all due respect as I really do appreciate what you do here and everywhere that you post. We really don’t look at it as just trying to take your money. The last few shared storage solutions that we deployed all came in at under $20,000. (One included 32TB of storage.)

Thanks,

Rob Brambila

System Engineer
Promax Systems
rob.brambila@promax.com
http://www.promax.com

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’m curious about this.

Were both Macs connected directly to one another and nothing else? And they had no connection on the other Ethernet port?

And, the cable was a proper CAT 6 type?

Neil

FCP Editor, Mumbai, India.
Completely PAL.