Not exactly an affordable solution

[Chris Blair]

Tyler,

While I cannot answer your specific hardware questions, I do know that on our Apace vStor system, setting up jumbo frames was a very simple process.

On the client side, we enabled it and set it at 9000 for each GigE card. On the server/raid side, we enabled it via a web based menu in the vStor, which handles all the link aggregation crap for you within Linux.

But even without the convenience of a web based GUI, on your Windows server it should be a setting somewhere in the menus you use to set up link aggregation. But….from what I’ve read (and gotten headaches doing so), jumbo frames will typically only give you about a 20-30% increase in throughput. So you’re only going to go from 23MB/sec to probably 30…certainly not enough to do any editing with.

Also…what speeds do you get from the raid directly on the server? If you’re getting 23MB/sec there, then that’s your problem. If you’re getting adequate speed within that box, then the problem is either the switch or the client PC setup.

Next…take one client PC and connect it directly to the server/raid, bypassing the switch. If you get the slow speeds, then it’s not the switch or any setting on it. If you get adequate speed, then it’s definitely the switch.

By doing this…you can narrow it down to which piece of equpiment is causing the slowdown rather than just blindly trying different things. I will say that it’s unlikely your managed switch is causing the problem as most switches act basically as relays. Even when we had our 48 port switch setup incorrectly, we still got 65-70/MB/sec with our vStor across all 4 edit stations. Setting it up correctly only gave bumped us to about 75/MB/sec with no noticeable performance improvement while editing.

Are you using at least Cat5e cabling everywhere? If you’re using a network that’s more than 5 years old, there might be cat5 cabling somewhere, which will slow things to a crawl.

Perhaps you’ve tried all this stuff, but it’s at least a few things to take a look at. Like Bob said, this stuff is incredibly complex…and every piece of hardware, in your chain (and it’s software driver) is a potential culprit in your slowdown.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Gary Gowman]

bob, never mind. i should have read the whole thread before posting. sorry 🙂

[Simon Blackledge]

This shows speed over single Gig-E from a server to client using a single EnhanceTech 4Bay. Was quite suprised with the result. AJA test showed similar.

https://tinyurl.com/4m84cj

[Parker Gowan]

So Tyler, did this setup end up working out for you? did you end up getting the speed you were looking for?

I am working on setting up a system with my production group and our IT folks are seriously PC centric – so my assumption is that in order to get the support at the most affordable price we will try the PC as server route.

Thanks in advance for any experience you can share!

Parker

[Tyler Jones]

Actually, we never achieved the speeds that are referenced in Bob’s article. I’m confident it can be done, but we just stopped trying to increase the speed because our company had to lay-off a lot of our staff, thus rendering our need for speed less of a priority. I will say, however, that it should be giving us all the promised speed but just isn’t for some reason. We’ve got jumbo packets turned on, the link aggregation setup correctly, all the hardware is what its supposed to be, etc… Again, I’m confident it can be done, but it would most likely require a lot of time to be spent on the phone with Netgear.