Poor Man’s SAN

[Bob Flood]

liam

I am sure there are numbers to crunch that would determine whether or not its feasible, but lemme tell ya this:

We have 2 FCP systems, one on a g5 and one on intel

The Intel is in a Client freindly edit suite with a big screen, comfy chairs, hot tub, some college cheerleaders, and espresso machine, ,where as the other systme is in a dark dank closet with a single bare lightbulb swinging forlornly over the keyboard. 🙂

So once for an unscheduled client review, I had to open a job on the Intel system (hot tub) that had the media residing on the G5 system (dank closet). The DVCpro50 media lives on a 4 drive sata array striped raid 0 on the G5, and the machines are connected gigabit ethernet.

I did not expect to be able to view or play the project with any
stability, but was pleasantly surprised when i was able to play at least 2 streams without rendering.

Even if i had to render, those files would be on my local drive.

Since then i dont move media files around as much as i used to. I open the G5 projects on the Intel and have at it

HOWEVER

I have no idea how this would affect the perfromance of the G5 for editing, AND I have no idea how much I am slowing network traffic OR how much a lot of network traffic would slow me.

AND I really have no idea about capturing this way, so i am not even gonna try

I suppose you could set up 2 systems like we have, capture and edit one one, and just edit on the other, and share the media accros the network. Sure would make it cheaper to connect machines to multiple edit rooms, since you dont need to!

BTW there are at least 2 SAN systems on the market that use Gigabit ethernet as opposed to fiber channel: Editshare and Apace

hope this helps

“I like video because its so fast!”

Bob Flood
Greer & Associates, Inc.

[Matthew Nelson]

When it comes to shared storage there are two schools NAS (network attached storage) and SAN (storage area network). The core difference between the two is a NAS is a file system I/O using TCP/IP with CIFS and/or NFS protocols and a SAN is a block I/O using SCSI protocol. A block I/O is treated just like a DAS (direct attached storage) volume by the client OS. Whereas a file system I/O is file by file based and with primary I/O processes done by the remote NAS head.

NAS systems are not recommended for NLEs for 2 big reasons bandwidth and protocol. NLE’s prefer block level I/O. As for bandwidth SANs can go north of 400MB/sec. That’s bytes. Where as a NAS is file by file and is limited to the Gigabit network, emphasis on bit.

So long story short yes you can use a NAS to share storage between FCP clients but they will be more unstable do to the file system and limited to a small number of streams of highly compressed media. Shared storage is a tricky beast that requires a good deal of IT expertise and more than a modicum of $$$. Tread lightly my friend.

Matt

[Thomas Tomchak]

I’m actually writing a post for my blog about this and ran across your post. I couldn’t help but share my own expereince.

I can tell you from 3 years of experience doing it, that under the right conditions, it can work very well.

I have a two suite shop, both with direct attached storage and gigabit ethernet connecting them. We work mostly in DV25 and DV 50 format, so bandwidth needs are well below what our network is able to provide.

With our setup, we are able to open and edit any project in either of the two rooms, regardless where it was started. While we are unable to do layoffs with confidences, everything else is fine and there is no noticeable performance difference unless the project is pretty large and complex.

As much as I would love a full blown san system, you can’t beat this for the money. It gets the job done and allows us to be very flexible with the schedule and our resources.

Thomas Tomchak – President, Edit Creations, Inc.
https://www.edit-creations.com, https://www.suitetake.com