SAN – Small Studio

[Jason Silzle]

Thank you for the time Bob. I get it, I am just struggling with “How hard can it really be”. I spent many years as a IT network admin and used to build editing workstations for people so i feel like I have enough understanding to be dangerous.

Example: just last night to try this out I setup My macbook pro running Jumbo frames and a windows 7 64Bit running jumbo frames. The MBP bombs out on Jumbo frames with the router so I set it back to auto Then I attached (to the MBP) a small Mini G-raid (FW800) and I shared that out to the windows box and I was able to play the one stream of HQX (Grass valleys edit format – similar in size to DNXHD) and it worked fine without dropped frames at about 20% network utilization with peeks up to 60% over 1GigE. This was via a cheep off the shelf Netgear R6300 home internet Router. So I kind of figure how much better could it work if it the MBP was running JUMBO frames and if this was a peer to peer connection using my windows boxes second 1Gige nic port?

Oh can someone please tell me do i need a crossover cable these days to do that? or are the nics smart enought now to work peer to peer?

Thank you,

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

[Jason Silzle]

Thank you David it does help. In fact I have been speaking with Adam over in your Santa Ana office. I sure wish you guys hadn’t moved off Technology drive (that was about 3 minutes from my place).

He told me about a something that might work well 😉 but I fear it is still just out of my league at the moment. I’ll be doing good to bring on the employee 🙁

What a blessing too have to much work to get done by myself. Now, if the revenue would just be too much!

Thank you,

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

[Eric Hansen]

hey Jason

looks like i missed this thread.

you got it to work in your own experiment with your laptop. that’s pretty much the config, minus a few tweaks. that’s how i got into this business. but there’s 4 issues:

1. Scalability – the method you’re using can’t scale
2. Latency – your setup will have EXTREME latency on the storage side. speeds aren’t the concern here. it’s low latency for multiple IOs
3. Support – if you built it and get it to work, who do you call when it goes down? For Mac-based stuff, you can get a little help on this forum. But for anything on the Windows side, you’re on your own.
4. R&D – these companies are constantly putting money into R&D to improve their current and future products. These are the little tweaks I’m talking about, hardware and software. You don’t have that kind of time.

i used to build these DIY systems for clients, and now I don’t anymore. Instead leaning on the companies listed here.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Caspian Brand]

Hi Jason,

If you want to repurpose that Windows computer with an Internal RAID, I’d recommend getting a RAID card that has an External port as well, this way you can add an external JBOD enclosure with more disks in a RAID. You’ll find 4 drives to be ok for some work with two drives, but 6-8 drives would be better and handle far more users.

You’ll also need management software if you want to be able to edit reliably. We provide our SANmp software for managing access to shared storage over iSCSI. You could use an iSCSI Target for your RAID drives from the Windows Server and format them as NTFS and HFS+ volumes managed by SANmp for sharing the higher performance video files.

An extra Ethernet card in the server would also be good, but I would minimally recommend Cat5e or greater for reliable Gigabit speeds. Using iSCSI and Gigabit Ethernet, with appropriately configured storage you can expect at least two streams of ProRes and DNxHD reliably.

You can check out and download trials of our software here:

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/sanmp/

Best Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Neil Sadwelkar]

In your first post you outlined your workflow. While it would be great to have one central storage from which your entire team works out of, it will be more expensive than the sum of individual attached storage boxes are.

I’m wondering, in your workflow where there seems to be the occasional sharing of data, do you really need everything central? Agreed, with individual storage, there will be duplication of media, but with storage costing what it does, who cares.
I’ve seen central storage boxes, well configured, also have huge masses of duplicate files if there’s no basic working discipline. And editors aren’t known to be the most disciplined of our species.

I think, for starters you need to make a good fast GigE network between your systems, then, give each system some good, RAID storage for critical files, fast SSD storage as ‘scratch space’ to store current files, and as a render drive. And, for project files, music, photos, build your DIY NAS who’s failure won’t bring your business to a halt.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I just noticed that the person who started this thread has the same name, Jason Silzle, as one of the hosts of this SAN forum. Is that a coincidence or are they one.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Jason Silzle]

OK so here is the deal I went to NAB for the sole purpose of learning more about NAS and SAN environments and after doing all that and with my IT background all I can say is…. I GIVE!

I have been won over by the guys at Promax! Ultimatly it all boils down to what do you want to do. Spend time monitoring your network or making money editing and producing products. While this is a huge expense for me I must say Adam of at Promax was incredibly helpful at tailoring something that will work well for us and gives us room to expand. I am also excited at the idea to have support and a team of knowledgeable people in the same county that can help should we need it.

We are only in the pre-sales/sold stage, in other words I don’t have the box here in the studio yet so I’ll have to update you all soon to how it is performing but I must say Promax is making every effort to deliver the box this Friday (earlier than they originally planned)and that is pretty impressive.

Thank you all for the great input and I look forward to letting you all know how it works!

here is the product we ordered “PLATFORM STUDIO”

Thank you,

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

[David Roth weiss]

[Neil Sadwelkar] “In your first post you outlined your workflow. While it would be great to have one central storage from which your entire team works out of, it will be more expensive than the sum of individual attached storage boxes are.”

Neil,

Actually, while that premise was true for many, many years, it is no longer true. the fact is, our ProMAX Platform and Platform Studio shared storage systems can easily beat the price of attached storage on all machines for a workgroup.

And, there are many benefits to having all media stored inon a single server other than the collaborative workflows editors typcially think of. There’s less hardware to buy, no unnecessary duplication or moving of media assests, and so tracking of assets, backups, and archival are thus much more efficient and thus less costly.

I hope this helps…

David

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]

So now I will probably sound like a crazy guy with multiple personality disorder because my last post talked about going with ProMax and yet here we are doing something different.

Here is what I want to say right up front. i’m not paid by any of these guys I am simply looking for the best solution for my small business and our workflow.

PROMAX: These guys were awesome and really worked with me to come up with something we thought would work, in the end it simply wasn’t the right solution for us. We have some tools that really need “BLOCK LEVEL” access and a true SAN environment and the “Platform Studio” wasn’t able to provide that. I will say it was a very nice box with a good Xeon setup with fast components and over a 1gigE I got about 80MB/s consistently (peak of 95) but we really hoped to be able to pull 3 streams of ProResHQ and this wouldn’t do it. Some of our other programs wouldn’t work at all because they saw this as a network resource (LR4) in in Edius we saw some dropped frames and PCI Buss loading problems. I must say the guys at Promax stood behind their product and really appeared to cared about us as a client. They were very friendly about allowing us to change directions and didn’t hit us with any silly restocking fee. I’m not sure if they would always do that or not but there were also some other mitigating factors that wouldn’t make sense to go into here. Bottom line…. Great box for some people and good service and support so go check it out.

I’ll go start another thread with what I have decided to do so check that out! maybe it can help someone else out there.

Thank you,

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

[John Davidson]

That’s probably about as good a speed as you’ll get over gigE. Please share whatever you end up with and thanks for giving us the update!

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