Optimizing Network

Storage & Archiving

Optimizing Network

Posted by Luke Reed on November 30, 2011 at 10:54 pm

Hello-

Problem:
Operating our small production company entirely across a local network has worked flawlessly for the last couple years. Recently, as we continue to grow, I have found the network has started to slow down- clearly understandable. I am now trying to increase our network speed and looking for any suggestions.

Background:
Our company specifically creates 5-30min flv videos with final resolution of 640×360. We shoot on Sony HDV cams at 1440×1080 , capture through firewire with CS5 Premiere and then create videos in CS5 AE with work comps 640×360. We have around 10 workstations operating windows 7 each with their own gigabit connection. We work entirely across a network share located on a windows sbs 2008 all connected over a gigabit network. I understand working over a network is unconventional workflow but is necessary because of our short deadlines, numerous client revisions and multiple editors working on each project- Version control on individual machines would be next to impossible.

One suggestion I came across was using an iscsi san for all of the video files, with the san and the designers hooked up to a dedicated managed switch. Thoughts?

Thanks for your time- Luke

Luke Reed replied 14 years, 5 months ago 3 Members · 3 Replies
3 Replies

Bob Zelin
December 1, 2011 at 1:14 am

I assume you are working at native HDV resolution in Premier, because
HDV is only 3.1 MB/sec – a tiny codec. With that said, you are STILL lucky that you were able to work in a shared storage enviornment with nothing but a regular network.

What are my thoughts ? You can choose ANY manufacturer of shared storage products, and it will outperform what you are doing now.
You don’t have a SAN. You have a network. And a simple managed switch will not increase your speeds.

There are lots of companies that make shared storage systems. Anything will be better than what you are doing now.

Bob Zelin
Steve Modica
December 2, 2011 at 5:51 pm

Hi Luke
Optimizing networks is pretty much what we do over at Small Tree. We’ve started moving 10Gb to the desktop now and will ship our first complete 10GbaseT solutions this month. Perhaps you should give us a call.
Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications
Luke Reed
December 6, 2011 at 7:01 pm

We are looking into building a SAN device for our production file sharing now and want to know if anyone has used ssd drives in a raid configuration to utilize their high IOPS and monster transfer rates? I know that different ssd drives are optimized for linear reads such as the intel 510 ssd and other drives are iops machines like the “max iops” drives from ocz. I have posted a report from our server and you can see that our IOPS are peaking at around 1100 during the day. can you tell me if you have any suggestions for ssd and video editing? And what area area should we most concern ourselves while editing vieo like we do using after effects as far as storage speeds(iops, random reads, sequential reads…etc)

thank you for your help.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/334/3373

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