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San (moved from XSAN category)
Thanks Bob Z, for moving me to this part of the forum, as I don’t need XSAN for what I need.
Let me tell you what I have in my mind for this SAN, It’s partly finding a use for a G5 Xserve, and partly fulfilling a need that someone else has with almost no money.
There are 4 FCP suites constantly sharing media via ethernet an moving firewire drives around. Not very productive. I had an idea to use the Xserve to share all these raided firewire drives and some others, with the four suites. I am planning to aggregate the two ports on each mac with CAT6 cable to a gigabit switch and use the aggregated ports on the Xserve too. Hopefully I can get some money to add some decent fast storage and 5 port ethernet card for the server an aggregate all those together. I think this should be satisfactory for the DVCAM footage they edit.Any advice or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
Andrij
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5 Replies
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sorry, but it sure sounds that someone that owns 4 FCP edit suites, employes at least 4 people, and has an Apple XServe, must have SOME MONEY to buy equipment – especially if they are busy enough to require a shared storage enviornment.
You need some sort of server (and I certainly don’t recommend an old G5 XServe), some big disk drive storage that is fast enough to serve out to 4 clients, and a switch that can feed all of these people. Link agg’ing 2 etherent ports on your Xserve will not give you enough bandwidth to feed 4 clients, without getting drop frame errors.
You need a server (like a MAC Pro), a multi port ethernet card for that server, a switch that supports link aggregation, and just a single ethernet cable to each client (link agging the 2 ports on the clients will do nothing for you). As you experiment with this, you will find that if you don’t have the right host adaptor for your drive array, or the right drive array with the right drives, you will get into trouble, and have drop frame errors, even though your drives may be fast in a stand alone situation. You will find that if you don’t get the right switch, it won’t support dynamic link aggregation (trunking doesn’t count), jumbo frames and flow control.
None of this is free. There are no free solutions, and although you may find it fun to experiment with this stuff, you will find that you ultimately fail. I often show people in person, a “real life” demo, of how I can play ProRes422HQ from one MAC to another, with nothing but a single ethernet cable. This is called “a dog and pony show” to demonstrate that it can work. But once you have multiple clients wanting to read and write off the same common shared volume, a simple network fails.
Let me know if you need more information – I am here.
bob Zelin
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Thanks Bob,
I am only an editor (not one of the 4), but a friend of the guy that’s started the company up. He always claims to be lacking in funds, and people there come and go, so I don’t think their earning anything like the money I am as a freelancer. While I know a little about networking and have seen different systems running at various facilities, like Avid Unity, MetaSAN and LANshare. The details of their setup is a bit of a mystery. I have to say the G5 Xserve is mine, I’m just not using it at the moment.What would you recommend I do? He’s had various quotes for systems from many people ranging from £20,000 – £30,000. He baulked at the price.
Andrij
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the 8 terabyte Maxx Digital Final Share system is about $12,000 US. And if you have your own INTEL based Mac Pro to act as a server (not a G5 XServe), it’s about $3,000 less. Please remember that this is a FCP based system only, and cannot handle any AVID’s.
Bob Zelin
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Wow. That sounds a bit more realistic. Will an older Dual Core Mac pro do? Or does it need to be a Quad?
Are there any UK dealers, or will I have to purchase direct from the US?Andrij
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purchase is US only, but you can certainly provide your own MAC.
Any Intel based MAC Pro will work, as long as you have OS-X 10.5.8 or OS-X 10.6.2 running, and EIGHT GIG of RAM (or 16 of course).Bob Zelin
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