Shared storage and FCPX

[Tim Wilson]

VERY nice! Thanks for sharing, Tom!

Terrific bit of writing from our old friend Peter Wiggins, but I have to tell you, speaking these days as a mere spectator to the game, I absolutely love what Sam Mestman is up to at LumaForge. As a member of a very small team trying to punch above our weight myself, I especially appreciate their dexterity and force of will. ???? I haven’t had a chance to check in with Sam yet this year, but I’m willing to bet that he and Noah are going to have some fun things for us to talk about at NAB again this year.

I’ll circle back later with some actual conversation about the provocative stuff raised here, but thanks again for pointing it out, Tom!

[Tom Sefton]

Met sam in person at IBC last year – great guy. He has a brilliant product – really looking forwards to using one later this year.

For any editors wanting to work to a budget but requiring stunning performance from a shared raid should look no further!

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Andy Patterson]

I see they used a Micro ATX form factor. The case is kind of unique. It is shorter than most mATX cases because the power supply is of to the side of the I/O ports but that will also make it wider.

Below is a quote from the article

“I think anybody including the old ‘seen it all before’ shared storage technicians would be impressed by 900 MB/s read/write on two iMacs from a desktop unit

That is simply the end result of RAID system. I am not knocking the system overall. The throughput is good but did they expect a read an write speed of only 200 MBPS? I can get serial ATA SCSI (SAS) controllers for $80.00 and 32 TB of storage (4 TB X 8) for about $880.00 SATA or $1600.00 SAS. Having said that I see a SATA drive in the picture. How much is this system?

If it is going to be traveling on flights wouldn’t a rackmount system with hot swap drive bays in a flight case be better? I am just curious if the case below would work? If so you could easily stripe 12 SAS drives together and upgrade another 12 as needed.

[Tom Sefton]

It’s small enough for carry on or you can purchase a custom peli case. The company make much larger options which have been installed rackmount – for a Swiss TV station recently I believe. If you want more details have a look at the Lumaforge website.

The performance/ease of use/ease of use with fcpx(or Adobe or avid)/size/tech support/plug and play are big selling points – probably would be cheaper options out there but same issues as with home made PC – you need to DIY and solve issues yourself. Directly competes with g-tech on price but allows up to 6 editors to work on a project with up to 240TB of rushes in raw in realtime, via 10Ge connection with great performance. And a 3 year warranty and remote support!

This plus fcpx is a brilliant package for completing medium to large projects that before were unavailable.

Co-owner at Pollen Studio
http://www.pollenstudio.co.uk

[Jeremy Garchow]

[andy patterson] “That is simply the end result of RAID system. I am not knocking the system overall. The throughput is good but did they expect a read an write speed of only 200 MBPS? “

That’s 900MB/sec each reading and writing at the same time.

The nice thing, too, is that you don’t need a separate switch as 2 – 10Gb, and 4 – 1Gb connections are built in.

This isn’t a direct connect SATA raid, so to factor in your price, you need a 4 port 1GB card, and a two port 10Gb card, as well as the programming to unite and share those out to other machines, as well as the software not the client machine side to make it an easy system to setup.

[Ronny Courtens]

There is much more to this system than just storage. Most of the research and engineering has gone into creating the fastest pipeline possible between the head unit (server) inside the box and the direct attached user connections. But what really makes this system stand out is that Write actions (ingest, exporting etc…), even at high speed , do not affect the Read performance. That’s why so many people chose this solution for high-speed editing against fierce deadlines.

Here you see one being used by the French company X-TREM Productions on the race circuit in Francorchamps for the Le Mans Formula racing championships. Multiple live streams from outside broadcast vans are ingested over 10 GbE in realtime onto the JellyFish while 2 lead editors and 2 journalists are editing the footage in FCP X at high speed while it is being ingested, outputting their edits near-live to national television and different online channels.

And here’s a setup we did two days ago in Barcelona at Mediapro, one of the largest service providers in Europe. Actually the “little” JellyFish Mobile with its 8 bays ran circles around their current QNAP 24-bay shared storage system, as well in Read and Write performance, waveform caching and editing latency, running FCP X for the award-winning primetime long-form tv-show Salvados. In the picture you see how easy it is to transport this system in a Pelican case. It also gives an interesting view on how they have set up their new MacPros in the server rooms.

The JellyFish Mobile is the smallest system LumaForge sells and it has a constant total bandwidth of 1800 MBS Read AND Write with SSD caching and close to zero latency. Their larger JellyFish systems (both mobile and rack-mounted) deliver up to 8000 MB/s Read and Write bandwidth and can expand up to 580 TB of working (100% useable) storage. Finally, the enterprise-class LumaForge ShareStation systems (which are already in operation in different broadcast stations and major post houses all over the world) can go up to 3 Petabyte of storage and achieve bandwidths of over 12.000 MB/s running on 10GbE to 100 GbE fiber pipelines. There will be a lot of very interesting news from LumaForge at the coming NAB.

– Ronny

[Andy Patterson]

[Tom Sefton] “It’s small enough for carry on or you can purchase a custom peli case. The company make much larger options which have been installed rackmount – for a Swiss TV station recently I believe. If you want more details have a look at the Lumaforge website.”

You can find smaller rackmount units that can use generic rackmount cases. The rackmount unit I showed has a lot of hot swap hard drive bays for adding drives as opposed to replacing hem. Although they can be replaced really quick by hot swapping them. No need to power it off.

[Tom Sefton] “The performance/ease of use/ease of use with fcpx(or Adobe or avid)/size/tech support/plug and play are big selling points – probably would be cheaper options out there but same issues as with home made PC – you need to DIY and solve issues yourself.”

Aren’t they in some ways just doing it themselves? I imagine I can buy all the same parts as they used. I would trust myself as much as them.

[Tom Sefton] “Directly competes with g-tech on price but allows up to 6 editors to work on a project with up to 240TB of rushes in raw in realtime, via 10Ge connection with great performance. And a 3 year warranty and remote support!”

I imagine it does compete with G-Tech. I was just hoping you could post the price. Having said that If you get more hard drive bays and 12 TB hard drives the storage space can be huge.

[Tom Sefton] “This plus fcpx is a brilliant package for completing medium to large projects that before were unavailable.”

Can you elaborate? Can’t Avid and Premiere work with this system as well as Mac and PC?

[Andy Patterson]

[Ronny Courtens] “There is much more to this system than just storage. Most of the research and engineering has gone into creating the fastest pipeline possible between the head unit (server) inside the box and the direct attached user connections. But what really makes this system stand out is that Write actions (ingest, exporting etc…), even at high speed , do not affect the Read performance. That’s why so many people chose this solution for high-speed editing against fierce deadlines.”

I hear what your are saying but I think I can go and buy all the same parts myself. I am not saying the system is not a good system. I imagine it works great for the price.

[Ronny Courtens] “In the picture you see how easy it is to transport this system in a Pelican case. It also gives an interesting view on how they have set up their new MacPros in the server rooms.”

I am hip to the rackmount devices for the Mac Pro but I would prefer a generic rackmount form factor myself (for transporting and in the studio).

[Ronny Courtens] “The JellyFish Mobile is the smallest system LumaForge sells and it has a constant total bandwidth of 1800 MBS Read AND Write with SSD caching and close to zero latency.”

If built a complete ATX editing system that could read and right at 1800 MBS would it be considered awesome or just a crappy DIY? I am not knocking the system over all. I just think if Apple did make a generic ATX computer the select few (5%) might be able to configure some awesome inexpensive systems on their own.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[andy patterson] “I hear what your are saying but I think I can go and buy all the same parts myself. I am not saying the system is not a good system. I imagine it works great for the price. “

You do understand that this it’s not just storage, right?

[Andy Patterson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “You do understand that this it’s not just storage, right?”

Yes I do. I am not saying it is not a good system for the price. I am kind of stating the obvious don’t you think? Why doesn’t Apple offer a generic ATX system? Obviously some people need their Apple computers rackmounted don’t they? Some users want the Apple OS to be set free as a generic install. No more Hackintosh just another PC build in general. I know Apple will not do it but the images prove that it would be useful don’t you think? Do you kind of see my point? Install the OS X on a generic ATX computer. Three our four years later when you upgrade why not be able to use the older system to create a system like the Jellyfish (for the 5%)? You cannot even add a generic USB 3.1 PCIE card to the Mac Pro. I am not saying you would want to but you cannot ad any new technology.