New “Bob Zilan Special” Component selection

[Bob Zelin]

Hello,
if you don’t have someone like Eric Hansen, Jordan Woods, Neil Sadwelkar, Mark Raudonis, Jeff Bernstein, or myself to assist you with this project, you will probably fail. This ain’t no plug and play project.

If you don’t want to go thru the aggrivation, companies like Maxx Digital sell this in a turnkey solution, so you don’t have to suffer.

I will answer your questions below –

you write –
I work for a small multimedia shop and need to come up with a good estimate for a “Bob Zilan Special” 16TB SAN. We have 2 edit system now, and we may add a 3rd. We have 2-3 other computers which will need to access the array, but only to copy completed files from it.

REPLY – easy, as long as you have MAC clients.

1- I remember reading a list of the companies which sold enclosures, but I cant find it again. So a pointer to a list of brands/stores would be helpful. I need at 16 bay enclosure preferably with redundant power supplies.

REPLY – can’t find companies that sell enclosures? They are right in front of your face, right here on this user forum, in the banner ads on Creative Cow. Can you not point your eyes to the left and to the right. Right HERE on Creative Cow are the companies that make the good drive arrays.

2- Controller – We never edit HD uncompressed and Prores HQ is the most demanding stream we may need to utilize. I was told by Smalltree that prores needs a “low latency” solution(1MB in 30MS) Here I would only be worried about my controller and drive choice causing a slowdown. Any recommendation for an array controller, I read about the ATTO 380 SAS controller. I’m used to Areca and 3ware controllers however. So SAS vs ESATA may be another question here.

REPLY – you have already spoken to Small Tree. They already told you about the ATTO R380 and Areca 1680x. What more information do you need – do you want someone to tell you “oh, you dont’ need to spend so much money for a host adaptor, you can use the much cheaper Highpoint RocketRaid card for this – it works fine” – well THIS IS WRONG INFORMATION. You spoke to the right company, and you already recieved the correct advice. Are you fishing for a cheaper solution ? SAS and eSATA are the same things today, from ATTO, Areca, 3Ware, LSI, and even Highpoint.

3- Drives- For the drives to put into the array, what are the good choices. I’ve used WD raid edition drives several times for other solutions, but it seems the Hitachi Saturn Enterprise drives tend to be the preference in SAN solutions. Any reasons behind this?

REPLY – we use Hitachis because they don’t break. But Western Digitals are just fine too. And many of us have used Seagates as well, with varying results.

4- I have HP 2800 series managed gigabit switches to do link aggregation. Anyone see a problem with this?

REPLY – let me get this straight. You already called Small Tree, and you are wondering if you should use the HP 2800 ? I have a great suggestion – why don’t you call Hewlett Packard, and ask their tech support team how to get link agg working in an OS-X enviornment. Let me know how they support you with this.

5- Raid software- I was considering this optional since the entire environment is AFP, and there is no concerns about crossing the streams(accessing a file on 2 systems simultaneously) Also, there is no reason for any special file security on the SAN. Any holes in my thinking here?

REPLY – AFP works fine, and certainly fine for your application. This is the bottom line. You are going to pay SOMEONE to help you with this. You will never do this alone. There are many fine companies that you see on these Creative Cow forums that can assist you with this, and there are many fine companies that you have obviously already spoken with. If you think that you are going to ask a lot of questions, and just “figure it out” without paying someone to assist you, you are dreaming. This forum, and other fourms on Creative Cow have wonderful knowlegeable people that can assist you with this, that have suffered thru this, and have all the answers that you need. And this information will not come for free. You may say “screw all this”, and buy a turnkey solution from a fine company like Apace Systems, or EditShare, or Facilis, or Maxx Digital, but if you try to cheap out, you will FAIL.

bob Zelin

[Margus Voll]

Hi.

Really nice replay i\’d say.
Generally good R&D project for free time 🙂 I liked specially drive part as i just have some failed seagates. Which hitachis to look at i wonder as there is probably enterprize and consumer models?

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu