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Professional video storage for current and old project?
Hello!
I work for a company that has a team that does video work, we have quite a few clients and are growing. And we are feeling the storage crunch.
Dropped a ton of money into the apple final cut server (which they could never get working) and now just use the SAN as our main editing / storage. (we have around 50 TB) We recently added a Drobo box to do “I dont need this right this second” backup. But we are running out of space again and figured there has to be a better more thought out way to approach this. Is there a standard method to do video backup and storage that you would recommend?Thanks for the insight!
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2 Replies
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Don’t know if there is anything “standard” per se.
On a higher end, there are enterprise class SANs and NASs like EqualLogic that automate everything and make it a snap to do expand, migrate, replicate, do snap-shots, thin-provision, etc. Super-cool stuff for geeks. Expensive: $20-40K for a 24TB box, and that’s just to start with. Nearly infinitely expandable. While performance is limited to dual bonded 10GBe per box (I believe), there are things such as SSD-based caching that’re transparent to the application.
These things aren’t designed for video (i.e. sustained throughput) but for enterprise IT, i.e. it’s all about latencies and transactions per second.
On the lower end you have to choose performance vs. convenience and automation. Performance-wise, nothing beats DAS (SAS 6G with a good RAID controller, specifically); has decent expandability features whereas you can add more boxes and expand existing volumes without any downtime. Attach it to a server and share.
For convenience (on the low end), it’s NASs like QNAP and Synology. Performance is not scalable and is limited to line speeds on available ports; expandability via USB or eSATA ports; some may offer replication.
Lastly, there are performance-oriented video-specific NASs such as Space from GB-Labs that can achieve pretty remarkable feats in terms per-port and aggregate throughput up 700MB/s on up to 10 ports with 10GbE, They start at about $20K.
Does this (sort of) answer your question?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
That gives me some great things to research, thank you!
Do you typically keep everything “live” and just expand the SAN (expensive storage) or do you have a multi-stage process SAN -> Drobo-style thing -> tape or something?Is there such a thing that automates that type of process? Or am I thinking about it completely wrong?
Would something like the EqualLogic do that?
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