Storage Options100+ TB

[Andrew Richards]

Drew,

I’d just like to throw my hat into the ring. We just announced Motion Media Suite, our new turn-key SAN with built-in backup and project-aware archive at NAB this week. Its storage characteristics are ideal for what you are describing, however since we are based on StorNext, your current workstations would not be ideal clients without the capacity to accept a Fibre Channel connection. Still, I think you should consider us along with the fine list Bob posted. You can learn all about Motion Media Suite at our site. I’m a Northwest PA native as well, so I’d be happy to visit your site in Erie to show a demo.

Best,
Andy

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Drew,

Here are the solutions pretty much everyone looks at and generic price levels:

Complete Solutions
– Facilis $$
– Studio Network Solutions $$
– EditShare $$
– Isilon $$$$

Resellers with solutions
– Promax ShareMAX $
– Maxx Digital Final Share $

Software solutions sold/support with 3rd party hardware
– Xsan (with Active or Promise storage)$$$
– MetaSAN (with any Fibre Channel storage)$$

There are a few others out there, but this is what I run into the most and what I’ve seen the most success with. All of these can scale to 100TB and all of the companies can support you remotely.

Resellers near Erie… not 100% sure, Tekserve is in NYC and is likely the best reseller in the region.

Performance. If you’re doing a GigE solution you should be able to push about 3 streams of ProRes to every client. If you’re going fibre, you should be able to handle uncompressed HD to every client.

Lastly, as far as Asset Management goes, I love CatDV. For what we do it’s generally CatDV of FCServer. CatDV does a bit more out of the box and you don’t have to worry about Apple discontinuing it.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[David Gagne]

Hey there. Fellow non-profiter non-sales guy here. I’m currently installing “100+ TB” as well, and I can offer some advice, and also a referral.

Obvious things to consider:
How many clients connected? What bit-rates are the video files accessed? Can you estimate a total aggregate bandwidth maximum you think you might need (Clients X Bitrate X Number of Streams Per Client Concurrent?) Also you COULD consider tiered storage, but it’s not ALWAYS cost effective.

Also, I would recommend something you feel comfortable supporting — if it’s in-house, make sure your staff gets trained properly. If it’s out-of-house, make sure you have a good relationship with the company. Generally it’s a bit of both, so do both.

That’s the basics.

What should you get? It always depends on your environment. Personally I really like Active Storage’s new MetaData Servers, and I like Active Storage or Promise for Tier 1 high speed storage, and NexSAN or LSI (netApp) for Tier 2. Or you can go with Tier2 all the way if you don’t need real high speed.

NexSAN just announced a new super-dense system with 60 drives in 4U… That’s 120TB! 4x8GB fibers, AutoMAID power savings… that might fit what you need. Add an expansion later if you need more 🙂

Here’s a referral to a friend of mine I’ve used, he’s based out of Cambridge, Mass. He also has a really smart engineer on hand who helped us find the right solution for us.

Brian Lahoue
brian.lahoue@strategichardware.us
https://www.StrategicHardware.us
617.417.6860 (direct)

Tell him David Gagne sent you 🙂

[Drew Mortensen]

David, Nate, Andrew, Bob, Chris, and Mark,
Thank you all. Being completely new to this whole arena, it is nice to have professionals willing to share their insight. Now that we have a collection of companies that specialize in video storage solutions, we are trying to answer some of the questions that you have laid out. I think that the next step that I am going to have to take is to gain a better understanding of the speed qualifications attributed to the various connection formats.

We are open to any further suggestions. From what it sounds like, there are probably many positive paths to follow.

Again, many thanks.

[Murat Karslioglu]

Hi Drew,

I’m the CTO of Raidundant. We are an emerging server and storage company and we’re currently developing a proprietary storage solution focusing on video and military applications. I personally like to learn more about the video industry and its specific needs. So i’m not a sales person, please give me a call if you still need advice and i’ll be happy to talk to you about the available storage technologies, performance specs and etc. in details.

Probably Direct Attached 6G SAS (JBOD) would be the fastest video editing storage you can get. I recommend that to video rendering studios, real-time 4K editors or financial institutions.
6G SAS JBODs are fast, you can use dual 6G RAID controllers and get 12G speed, but not sharable unless you share it on the connected host computer and you can not connect a SAS JBOD directly to your laptop. So this option won’t work for you.

Second option would be 8Gb FC SAN, FC is a reliable and also fast, but requires FC HBAs and special cabling that may not work for your setup either.

It seems like Gb iSCSI is your only option, it is not the fastest though, but i’m confident that it will be enough since you work on laptops.

I would definitely suggest something more flexible, expandable and higher performance such as a ZFS based SAN solution for future expansion. Our Felix Z Series is a unified storage solution that supports 4/8Gb FC, 1/10G iSCSI and NAS (CIFS, NFS) with all enterprise features you may need and affordable. Specially block level inline dedup can save a lot of space for you. Our Felix F8 and Felix i1/i10 Series have 42 (126TB) or 60 drives (180TB) in 4U. I would be happy to discuss the options with you. Call our number below and ask me.

I’m on the technical side, so you don’t have to purchase anything from my company. Storage is my expertise, but I like to learn more about video production storage requirements for our future projects and expand my network as well. Thanks.

Murat Karslioglu
muratk@raidundant.com
https://www.raidundant.com
(855) 247-RAID