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SanMp + X Raid + OSX 10.3.9 and problems
Hi,
I hope some of you have already met with this problem, so I start:
We have a problem with our system. 3 FCP 4.5HD (G5 AJA Kona card, 2* 2GHZ, 4 GB RAM, so it’s strong enough), 7.5 TB X-Raid, 2GB SAN cards – and SanMp clients software. We use a vyxel 9200 switch to share the raid between the FCP-s.
We use 10 bit SD materials, not HD.
If 2 FCP have read permission on a volume and play the same project, same timeline (from the same volume), everything is OK. The bandwith meter shows 50-60 MB/s, but if we try to use the third FCP from the same volume, 2 machines of the 3 FCP will stop with the error: drop frame has occured.
If 1 FCP has write and one has read permission, the one which has read permission will stop with drop frame error.
So we cannot share the volumes. (only in read mode) For us it seems that there is some problem with the bandwiths, maybe the xraid is too slow, maybe the switch has some problem.
We use:
1 TB volumes, RAID3 and Raid5 volumes.
We has the latest firmware in the X raid, the latest client software for the SanMP.
We use the latest 10.3.9 upgrades.
The switch shows 2GB/s bandwiths for the ports, F type of port and some advance features I cannot understand (adtov, detov orsomethinglikethis…) in fabric mode…
(we used older softwares and firmwares as well, but after the upgrade nothing happened)
Any idea to try?
Thanks:
Thomas
Budapest
Hungary -
7 Replies
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Is AutoSync on the SANmp Admin for the shared volumes enabled ?
If it is, try disabling it. We’ve seen dropped frames when the AutoSync is enabled.
-chrispy
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yes, it is disabled.
It is a useful option, but not for video editors…
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Hi ThomasO,
When you say the feature (Autosync) is not useful for video editors, what exactly do you mean ?
Also, how is your XRAID set up ? You mentioned in RAID3 and RAID5 but are the two channels independent or did you stripe them across ?
-chrispy
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When we turned the autosync on, the G5 got extremly slow during the syncronization. You cannot play anything from the raid.
I think this function can be good for database sharing.They are not cross linked. Is it possible, that 6 HDDs in a stripe are not enough for playing out sdi stream on 2 computers?
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Use the Kona System Utilites to do a benchmark on your RAID set and see what numbers you get. 10bit SD requires about 26-28MB/sec per stream so if all 3 systems are going to playback, you will probably hit the ceiling and that’s probably why you are encountering the problem. I would strongly suggest that you stripe them across both channels.
By the way, why do you have one RAID set is RAID3 and the other in RAID5 ?
-chrispy
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Thanks. I gonna stripe them across.
One thing I cannot understand. The meter shows me 170MB/s, (for huge files).
And the ceiling is about 60MB/s – 70 MB/s for the raid. Which is true now?(Raid 5 was created to test the speed of the raid, but of course it has the same problems as the raid3).
Here everyone suggested to use raid5, thats why we tried it. -
I don’t understand – which meter shows 170 and which ceiling 60-70?
When you stire the LU’s together, be sure to disable journalling. You can then test the disk speed on the stripe set before even converting it to a sanmp volume.
I found it difficult to figure out which LU’s to stripe together, so next time I will make all volume slightly different, but with mathing sizes for the LU’s I want to stripe. I have bought two new 400GB drives for the aDTX array, so I will need to re-set up the array from scratch.
Another tool I found useful was the QLogic 5200 switch’s performance monitor – it shows read and write traffic on each fibre port.
Regards
Francois
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