Scalable storage solution, that won’t break the bank

[Jordan Woods]

I’ll wait for Bob to chime in on this one 🙂

Icy docks and the latter… AAAAAHHHHH, run! If you are a serious video professional that takes work serious and your data serious, your infrastructure has to be taken serious as well. Buying hard drives from Frys and sticking them into your Icy Dock is just asking for data loss. Real solutions are expensive for a reason, because they are tested and guaranteed to work, with minimal chance of failure.

Here is the easy part, state your budget for shared storage and your expectations of what you need this to do. If this is known, you will find your answer. If you plan on a minimum of $3000, I think you will be moderately satisfied.

-jw

[Matt Geier]

Hi Krysttian,

Reading your post, it’s like a lot of other posts out here that want to do shared storage and have real time shared editing access, but don’t understand the cost of WHY you need to spend that $2000 for the switch, or $7000 for a storage unit.

And, to boot, you have an even harder time, because you know you can buy these things for much less on your own search, and TRY this on your own.

But what happens when it doesn’t work?
Who do you call?
Where do you start troubleshooting what’s wrong?

Here’s the WHY you need to plan on 7-12K for what you are looking for;

Server with Multiport Gigabit / or 10Gb Ethernet Card:

A Multi Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter from Small Tree
(this goes into your apple server and will serve the clients with Gigabit connections / or serve a switch with a link aggregated connection for multiple clients…)
Price $700+

Switch:
A Managed Gigabit Ethernet Switch;
1) It must do Dynamic Link Aggregation
2) Jumbo Frames (some do it, but not well..)
3) You must know how to configure this. Also, if you have a problem and you’re doing this on your own, you must know how to make sure the switch is set up properly for a video network.

Small Tree has one for less then $1200. — ES4528V

Storage:
The Storage should be tested and qualified to support “real time” and work 100% of the time in a real time environment. If you are okay having a non real time solution that works 70/80% of the time, and you don’t mind being down that 20% of the time, you can go find the cheapest most inexpensive storage you can.

From your post, you’ve already experienced this “down time” enough already.

Or your best option, is to keep getting input from all these wonderful Cow people!

After you feel like you’re in over your head, or someone filling your head with “no you cannot do this with Ethernet” then you can reach out to Small Tree, and head over to the forum there and start asking more questions. Small Tree’s GraniteSTOR ST-RAID line is engineered and designed to specifications, and tested / qualifed by Small Tree to work under Shared conditions while supporting the needs for real time access.

You can find the Small Tree forum here
https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree —

Look forward to seeing you some more!

Matt G

[Bob Zelin]

look, I will make this simple (and insulting). Do you know what you can do for 40 bucks – you can get lunch for you and your co worker. That’s it. You can’t do ANYTHING for 40 bucks. People see that 500 Gig drives for 60 bucks at https://www.newegg.com, and think that “everyone is ripping them off” and they can have shared video storage for 200 bucks. Well, guess what – YOU CANT. You know what you can get for 200 bucks – a crappy disk drive product. Cheap shared storage will cost you over 10 grand, and expensive shared storage will cost you over 60 grand. A decent RAID 5 RAID array is going to be over 4 grand from ANYONE – and when you see these cheapo RAID 5 boxes for $1500, they are not hardware RAID 5 controllers.

But this is the SAN networks forum. What can you have for 40 bucks – a kick in the pants off this forum. Shared storage is expensive – it’s dramatically cheaper than what is was in the recent past, but it’s still expensive, and even the easiest systems are not plug and play. The labor to install a shared storage system (even the cheap ones) is more than you want to spend for the entire system.

My advice – keep moving those Icydock boxes back and forth between your computers.

Bob Zelin

[Mark Raudonis]

[Bob Zelin] “What can you have for 40 bucks – a kick in the pants off this forum.”

Quote of the year from Mr. Z. !!!

mark

[Eric Hansen]

hey krysttian

as Matt eluded to in his post, these products are more expensive than what you may be used to because they are very specialized and they have thousands of hours of testing and real customer service behind them. i buy from Small Tree because they know the equipment they sell inside and out, and in many cases they have custom firmware installed. i also know i can get Matt or Chris on the phone RIGHT AWAY to troubleshoot a problem. good luck doing that with Netgear.

it sounds like you’re a super small operation, which makes this seem even more expensive. to be honest, the system i would recommend to you would be roughly the same price as a system for 4 or 5 concurrent editors. the SAN system in the article you read definitely has a minimum price you have to overcome. but the cool thing is that it scales extremely well and is inexpensive compared to other SAN options out there. to double your storage or double your connections only costs a fraction of the initial install. this point is most appealing to my clients.

you should consider how much storage you really need. in the facilities i work with, its all about getting the footage on the system as fast as possible, then getting it off the system as fast as possible after the edit is over. you don’t want to keep media and projects stacking up on these RAIDs. that’s expensive. so consider your archive strategy too. don’t just keep media sitting on random external drives with no plan.

you may be getting answers here in this forum that you didnt expect. but the truth is that we have all been there with cheap equipment and NO customer service and we’re all over it. we work in professional environments and require professional tools backed by real professional tech support. we all have recognized that true value is not the lowest number on the product’s receipt.

one last thing. get on the phone with someone like Matt. he can answer a lot of your questions quickly. i look back at how much research i’ve done over the years and it can be daunting. i couldn’t imagine starting from scratch again. if you value your time, you WILL save money going with a more “expensive” turnkey system like the GraniteStor.

e

Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com