new 10gig shared storage solution for under 10 grand

[Tanya Meronk]

Bob, how are you?

It’s good to hear the price is dropping.

Just curious…which 10gig switch(es) were you using?

[Bob Zelin]

the new Netgear series. They are great. They are now part of the Final Share system, which is why everything is dropping in price. They work great. 10Gig Ethernet is great, easy and fast.

Bob Zelin

[David Gagne]

40gig is coming…

[Bob Zelin]

actually 40 gig is here, but do we really need it with what we do for a living right now – especially since the bottleneck has become the drive arrays. Perhaps when 12g gets released in 2014, then we can say “oh – 10 gig is not fast enough” – but for now, it is. Unless you use multiple host adaptor cards, you won’t get a single ATTO or Areca card to go faster than 1600MB/sec, even with 24 drives.

Let’s face it – most of the people on these forums are using 20 – 30MB/sec (just like you David !) – which is why even standard 1GbE is “good enough”. With the advent of cheap 10G switches being released now in 2013, going to “the next level” is available to all of us. I mean, I just look at a great company like Facilis, yet for 1GbE they are still using link agg. They could tomorrow pop in a 10G card, hook up a little 10g switch, and do the same thing.

In the same way that Blackmagic is leveling the playing field in our business, the advent of cheap 10G is doing the same for “hi end” network IT solutions.

As you know David, since you did it by yourself too – it’s having the knowledge that’s valuable, not needing the “big bucks” like in the old AVID Unity or XSAN days. Those days are over.

Bob Zelin

[David Gagne]

I’m mostly curious how much of the networking industry will leapfrog 10Gb, at least for uplink/data connections. Why? Because the cost isn’t THAT much higher with the major network players (who are already expensive for 10Gb).

You’re right, most of my stuff is 30MB/sec. But most of my files are 3+ hours long. Which means they still take a long time to transfer or process. If my transcode clients are 10Gb and have huge amounts of CPU, I believe each could saturate a 10Gb connection. Yeah I’m not doing that today, but who knows about tomorrow?

But you’re right, the bottleneck is currently the drive arrays. But I think that bottleneck will shortly be resolved by things like ZFS and memcaching/ssd caching or tiering.

I may have “done it myself” but I’ve also learned where it’s useful to buy something 🙂 You always get what you pay for.

[Oliver Timm]

Hi Bob, thanks for sharing. Just curious about the rest of the hardware – what 10gb nics were you using and what storage? Interested in doing something similar with 3x edit suits using AJA IO XT, 27″ iMac.

Cheers,
Oli

[Andreas Aanerud]

Hey Bob,
I have read at least most of you’re posts, they are great =)
Think this is the first time I’m posting, and not always reading.

Last year i build a storage system for our company, we got 2 Flame systems, and a davinci resolve,
so we had to get them integrated and working on the same transfer/work storage. So with all the knowledge from Creative Cow forum’s, and a lot of googling, we built a ZFS System based on Open Solaris, with Napp-it, and the core is a 10GbE infrastructure with a 10GbE Dell 8024 switch, the NIC´s is ATTO Fast Frame 12 on the mac, and Intel AT2 on the Linux machines.

Speed on NFS shares is around 550 MB R/W so i have to say, 10GbE is kinda fast and cheep, of course, its a lot of “setup” around it. But hey, that´s just fun 😉

Glad that otters are testing 10GbE more and more. I think if the transfer protocol like NFS is more optimized then we can look at bigger and bigger systems that will work together without lots of fibre gear, locked LUNs and ISCSI Devices.

Best
Andreas

[Eric Bullock]

I’ve taken a look at the Final Share 10G solution and I’m quite intrigued. And surprised that this would be effective for sharing the same media concurrently between 3+ workstations without MetaLAN or something similar. Can you please clarify that this just uses the built-in file sharing capabilities of the client version of the OS…and its effective for sharing media concurrently between 2-3 systems?

Our client has about 20TB of data on two external Thunderbolt RAID’s and they want to share it with a new edit station and another iMac that is in the room. A 10G Ethernet setup seems like the way to go…I’m just surprised it can work without some kind of software like MetaLAN, etc.

Thanks for all of your contributions to the Cow over the years!

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Eric –
you don’t need MetaLAN, you don’t need anything. The Mac OS will allow you to do everything you need.

I can show you how to do it, too ! Just contact me at maxavid@cfl.rr.com. It’s easy.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Oliver –
we use Maxx Digital storage, and we tried every 10gig NIC on the market – Solarflare, ATTO, Myricom, Chelsio, and Small Tree – they all work great.

I can help you build a system if you like. It’s cheap and easy.

Bob Zelin