SAN – Small Studio

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Jason,

Trying to cobble together a makeshift SAN will undoubtedly consume your waking life. Any editing efficiencies you’re hoping to achieve with a working shared storage system will quickly become secondary to you, and instead you will become a full-time IT guy with no time for editing. At ProMAX we see this all the time, with even dedicated IT pros failing constantly.

At ProMAX we have exactly what you need – it’s a revolutionary new shared storage system for small workgroups of 2 to 4 users that offers the lowest cost, highest performing shared storage solution for small workgroups on the market. It’s the baby brother to our powerful Platform Modular Server you can see on our site at https://www.promax.com/s-197-promax-platform.aspx.

Contact me offline at the email address below for more information and I’ll be happy to tell you all about it.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Jason –
I am going to make an assumption that you have possibly glanced at this forum in the past, before making your post.

As David has just mentioned, why on earth are you trying to piece this together when countless shared storage systems already exist on the market, that will work perfectly for you, and do exactly what you want.

I get the impression that you want to take your old Windows 7 computer, shove some drive in it with a 4 port ethernet card, plug it into your Mac workstations and expect that you will instantly have a working shared storage enviorment to be able to do DNxHD and ProRes422HQ. If it were that easy, David, myself, and every one of the professional vendors that manufacture shared storage enviornments would not be in business.

I can only assume that you want to do this because you do not want to spend the money for a pre-manufacturered shared storage product, which already works. Perhaps you are saying “I don’t need to give them all that money, I can do this myself !”.

Do you really think it’s just going to plug in and work ?

Bob Zelin

[David Roth weiss]

Bob and I never used to agree on much of anything, now we agree on almost everything. It just goes to show, if you hang around this planet long enough, miracles can and do happen.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Jason Silzle] “-Do I need additional management software? I would run Windows 7 64b professional as the server or I might have an un-opened Windows Server 2008?”

For a DIY video NAS, what you need is a software platform that is capable of handling TCP/IP sessions with low latencies and low overhead, adequate for video editing in general and your video editing app specifically. No such COTS parts exist, except from vendors specializing in video editing and shared storage – like ProMax, Small Tree, Facilis, GB Labs.

For a DIY NAS, there’re various Linux distributions that may work, and will likely take a good effort to get it to work for your scenarios. FreeNAS is one such distribution.

That’s the main reason video NAS is still a good business for integrators (can’t buy it from Amazon), and why David’s and Bob’s recommendations are perfectly valid. Unless you’re willing to spend considerable time making things work – and then maybe you’ll be in a position to become the next ProMax or Small Tree. 🙂

Of course you could always get a beefy $15K server, 10GbE cards on all ends, and 10GbE non-blocking switch, and things may just fly. Or, you could get a less expensive and a better supported solutions from one of the vendors listed above. 🙂

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Jason Silzle]

Thank you Alex for the pointers towards FreeNas and just help in general.

Everyone else… Well.. Guys I appreciate the honesty about how hard this is going to be but at the same time it feels a little like your just using the COW as a place to hand pick customers. instead of offering advice of how it could be done (the very idea behind open FORUMS!!) your drive traffic back to your products. Well i don’t want to spend my time as an IT guy and I even need to spend less time editing and more time managing my business so I would be happy to by some of your products if the markup wasn’t so obscene. Really $10-15K for parts that on the open market cost less than $3-4K? I get that your time is worth something like mine. I also get that not everyone in the world is going to buy your products so the markup needs to be high but don’t bust my chops because I want to try to save a buck. Just offer some advice, share, point me in the right direction. I simply don’t have those kind of resources at this point in the game.

I guess I would have expected some of your responses if I was on your private companies forums but I just expected the Cow to be a community of people here to help others DIY.

If anybody else has any advise as to how TO do this I would love to hear it.

Thank you,

Thank you,

Jason Silzle
https://www.dovedigitalmedia.com
Owner/Founder
Dove Digital Media

[John Davidson]

Bob and David give quite a bit of their time helping people for free, including me. The resources are all here if you want to build your own NAS, but in a mixed pc/mac environment you’re going to encounter problems on top of the usual problems found in a pc only or mac only environment. That’s where their markup comes in. There has to be some profit over cost of materials if you expect people to happily answer all your questions (and there will be a lot of them), otherwise how will they pay their own bills?

There are a hundred different ways to do what you want to do. Inevitably if your business is growing you’ll need to bite the bullet on something. For two users an 8 drive enclosure (or 16 even) would be preferred – there are many vendors that sell those. The drives for this should be Hitachi ultrastars or other enterprise/server class drives. I used to get by with Deskstars, but now I realize that Ultrastars are worth the added expense. You want at minimum RAID5 for protection of your material. Shoving drives in a chassis will be catastrophic if one dies in RAID 0. You want the Small Tree PEG6 (that’s what I call it, it’s actually PE2G or something like that) so that ethernet is regulated accurately to all the receiving systems. You want a good computer to run the server, it cannot run off a computer you are editing with. The computer will need good RAM in it, at least 4 Gigs per user (although I’m starting to think 8 is even better). You will need a RAID card, either the Areca 1882x or the ATTO R680. Some of these solutions offered by the different vendors do not need a server computer, which is possibly why their prices are more expensive than you expect. Also personally, I use NAS instead of SAN.

Long story short, congratulations on your business growth. Enhancing your shared storage is an evolutionary process for a growing video business. As you needs grow though, the costs will grow as well. I will tell you this as the exact same thing happened to me 2 years ago. Get the bigger storage now and do it right the first time. I screwed around for 2 years before I learned this lesson. I don’t sell storage and am not recommending a specific company so perhaps my advice will be well taken.

Good luck!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Marcus Lyall]

Hi Jason,

Have a look at some of my previous posts from a few years back on this forum.
I did the same kinda DIY thing as you are talking about.
I did get it working. It didn’t cost £15k to set up.
It still works now. Does exactly what you need.
Built with off-the-shelf gear.

I also had a FreeNas 20gb system built for me by an IT buddy.
8 ethernet ports. 80mb per second to each port. Works like a charm. That was also cheaper than the turnkey system. But it’s now our backup system.

We still ended up buying a turnkey solution for £27k.
Why? Because I like being able to point the finger at someone else when the storage goes down in the middle of a project.

Turnkey thing was overpriced, is now out-of-date and has had problems. But I still don’t regret buying it.
Wait till your primary storage goes down in the middle of a big project, when you built it yourself. I have been there. It’s not nice.
Seriously. If your storage stops working, then your business is screwed.

Buy an overpriced turnkey system from a nearby reseller.
Get a rock-solid backup strategy. Tape storage for safety. Cheap disk backup so you can keep working.

[Bob Zelin]

Marcus writes –
“Seriously. If your storage stops working, then your business is screwed.

Buy an overpriced turnkey system from a nearby reseller.
Get a rock-solid backup strategy. Tape storage for safety. Cheap disk backup so you can keep working.”

REPLY –
this is FANTASTIC advice. When I built our first shared storage system in 2008, it was done for ONE client, and after I built it (and wrote an article about it for Cow in 2008), it stopped working in 2 weeks, and I looked real bad in front of my client. And so I continued to research why it did not work. And kept at it. And every time I got something working, there would be another variable, and I would have to figure that out. And because I was putting so much time into this, I wound up selling it other clients – and guess what, they had DIFFERENT problems, and I had to figure it out, and it was hard, and took a lot of time.

These days, when you deal with assorted products from Highpoint, Promise, ATTO, Areca, etc. there are ALWAYS new problems, especially when Apple makes changes to the operating system. And when you do this for a living (like I do) – you have to SIT THERE AND SUFFER to figure out why things dont’ work, or you will get a bad name, and people won’t hire you anymore. Is this what you want to do ? I though you were an editor/graphics person that was MAKING MONEY by doing editing and graphics. Do you have the time to get involved in a project like this ?

I certainly did, and so did many of the other people (like Andy from EditShare who was an AVID editor, and Gary from Studio Network Solutions who worked for a recording studio) and we turned this “project” into our CAREERS because if you are doing shared storage enviornments, there is no more time to edit, or do graphics.

When you buy a Mac, or Adobe CS6, or an AJA card, you spend your money, and you expect it to WORK, so that you can WORK, and make a living, and provide your client with their end product. That’s all that matters. And when you try to build it yourself (anything, including making cables, or furniture for your edit console) this takes away time from how you MAKE A LIVING, and promote your career as an editor or graphics artist.

There are lots of budget solutions out there – spend your time finding one that works. I can only assume that you want to have shared storage to increase your productivity, and to increase your sales revenue, not because it’s gonna be “cool” that you put this computer thing together yourself, and look how cool this is.

Bob Zelin

[David Roth weiss]

[Jason Silzle] “Really $10-15K for parts that on the open market cost less than $3-4K?”

Jason,

For the record, with our newest scaled-down version of ProMAX Platform, just days after ordering, you could have 2 to 4 editors collaborating in a shared storage environment. It would be installed by us, with training, and it includes one year of ProMAX Preferred Support, this is all at pricing lower than anything else on the market.

And, you’d be just one phone call away if an issue should arise.

I hope this helps…

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Jason Silzle]

Thank you very much… Advice well taken 🙂

I apologize to all if I seemed to rough in my reply above, I was taken back at the responses and the hit me as less about helping and more like a cautionary tale of “Don’t do it” that felt like there was an underlying, “Just buy my product instead”.

Again I didn’t mean to offend.

Thank you,

Jason Silzle
https://www.dovedigitalmedia.com
Owner/Founder
Dove Digital Media