Shared Storage Newb – Help with Final Cut options

[Kevin Dooley]

Clearly using one of the systems offered above would be a more ideal solution – but I was wondering if anyone has any experience at all using a DroboElite iSCSI san unit?

Being only 8 bay and the max drive size for this application being 2Tb, it looks like it would only give us 16Tb, so we would need 2 units to start – so it’s already looking like something I don’t really want to get into. However, in the interest of completeness I need to be able to say I looked at and asked for advice in regards to lower cost solutions.

If there are those out there that have used it:

Would this unit be able to handle multiple clients running multiple streams of ProRes or ProRes LT 1080p footage to multiple clients or would it be more of an offline storage solution?

Kevin Dooley
Video Director
Lake Pointe Church

[David Gagne]

Kevin,

I like yourself work for a ministry doing a lot of video production. I am the IT administrator that cares for the storage solutions. I can give a few thoughts that might be helpful for you.

First: Be prepared to spend $$ to send your IT guy to training if he isn’t an expert on some of this stuff. Depending on the solution you pick, he may need Final Cut Server class, and/or Snow Leopard Server classes, etc. These things are pretty complex, and if your guys don’t understand user permissions, server/client configurations, etc etc you can find yourself in bad situations even with good equipment. We are planning to go take some training now so we can fix things that didn’t get set up right the first time. Classes from Apple run around $2k per class.

Second: Be careful what solutions you pick. Our systems integrator has steered us wrong before, so make sure to get a few opinions before you pull the trigger. Promise Vtrak has worked for us pretty well, but I think at this point Active Storage is better (assuming you need that kind of bandwidth). I’d stay away from Drobo as edit storage, but possibly use it for backup or archive storage.

Third: You don’t *need* Final Cut Server. If you have some disciplined people who have a defined workflow that’s simple enough, you can move/tag the files yourself. We’ve been doing this for a few years now, and still haven’t needed FCS — although we’re getting close to needing it as our workflow gets more complex.

Fourth: Team Management and Systems Management is critical. Having a well defined workflow, someone who keeps people following “the rules,” etc., rather than just letting people do whatever they want with your expensive equipment. Also, if you don’t have someone monitoring and taking care of your systems, you will likely have costly down times. Again, if you’re going to spend the money on the equipment, make sure it’s being utilized properly, otherwise you are wasting your money.

Our Example:
We’re quite a bit bigger than you, dealing with 60-100 hours of live footage a week, and also creating promos, DVDs, etc., constantly.
We have:
20TB XSAN (Promise vTrak) – This is our edit storage, very fast, where live projects live.
MDC1,MDC2 — Apple XServers that handle metadata moving back and forth to the SAN. You can get by with a Mac Pro, but you definitely want a second Mac Pro as a live backup MDC in case one crashes.
20TB Isilon Storage (4 Nodes) – This is our ingest storage, but will be moved to be archive storage soon. It’s Ethernet based, so it’s slower… Drobo could also do ok for archive storage probably, and is a lot cheaper. We will probably use XSAN for ingest in the future (we do live capture of 1080i).
We have 7 Mac Pro clients that do all our editing, connected to the SAN via QLogic fiber switch.

We also have around 50TB of footage sitting around on bare SATA drives that go into external firewire chassis. I do not recommend this — this was a result of having way too much footage and not enough storage, and a tight budget. Get Drobo or something else, even if it’s not super great, just don’t do the bare drive thing, as there is no safety net.