Storage Solutions for Production Studio

[Bob Zelin]

Replies below –

The production studio I work with runs primarily on 27 inch iMacs.

REPLY – if they are the i5 or i7 iMAC’s, it won’t work, as these cannot support jumbo frames, so you won’t get multiple streams of ProRes coming off of these new iMAC’s. If you have the Core2Duo or any OLD iMAC, this will work fine.

We do mostly HD video and some 4K video for bigger productions. Right now the entire studio works off of portable hard drives that they transfer from station to station as needed for each production step. We are looking to setup a large storage solution so we don’t have to keep transferring these files via portable hard drives, not to mention we would like something a bit more secure. In the end we can only run gigabit ethernet as iMacs don’t allow for fiber so right there our bandwidth is limited. So what I’m looking for are some ideas from others as to what a good solution would be for 10TB’s of secure storage. Ideally we would stream directly from the server but I don’t foresee that being an option with only giga e. Any ideas or thoughts would help. By the way, lets assume money isn’t an issue.

REPLY – this is absolutely an option for you. You can go to the SAN Networks forum and discuss this in more detail on that forum. You simply setup a link aggregate port in a MAC Pro server, and you can do exactly what you want, and play back over regular ethernet. These solutions are available from Maxx Digital, Small Tree, Apace Systems, and EditShare – all regular ethernet, all are teriffic.
With all of these solutions, you can stream directly from the server’s hard drives (a big mama SATA RAID 5 drive array).

What other details would you like to know.

bob Zelin

[Dustin Betterly]

So when you say the systems are available from Maxx Digital, Small Tree, Apace Systems, and EditShare are they listed as SAN’s or just RAIDs? Here is what I see listed:

Small Tree:
ST-RAID, abcSAN

Maxx Digital:
Not sure which ones, there are tons!! The company I have had great luck with is Caldigit. Great customer service. HD Pro 2 looks very appealing.

APace:(not appealing website, sounds stupid…but makes me think)
eStor, vStor

EditShare: (like what I see)
3RU looks promising.

I will definitely be hitting up the SAN Network forums. Any additional insights would be great!!

[Simon Blackledge]

Here ya go Dustin.

https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=117

S

[Bob Zelin]

The company I have had great luck with is Caldigit. Great customer service. HD Pro 2 looks very appealing.

REPLY –
Dustin –
I love Cal Digit, and the HD Pro 2 is a great disk drive array, but it is not a shared storage system. You must purchase the Super Share from Cal Digit to have shared storage, and super share will NOT support anything but Fibre channel clients (and that means no iMAC computers).

Bob ZElin

[Bob Zelin]

Dustin,
I am bothered by the reply that I just gave you. I told you which companies offer ethernet based shared storage. Do you know what is next for you – you have to CALL THESE COMPANIES, and ask them questions. And discuss it with your company. And all of this takes time. A shared storage system is not like picking out “drive box XYZ”, ordering it from B&H Photo, plugging it in, and all of a sudden you have shared storage. ITS COMPLICATED and it takes time to determine what you need, and it will take time to put together a system, get it working, and know the correct workflow for your company. This is NOTHING like ordering a firewire drive.

Now, pick up the phone, and call all 4 companies I told you about, and then call Cal Digit, and ask them about Super Share.

Bob Zelin

[Dustin Betterly]

Thank you Bob, but I’m one step ahead of you. Already been speaking with Maxx Digital.

[Bob Zelin]

That is a good choice. Let me tell you a little about that system. It’s nothing more than a MAC Pro with a big disk drive array on it (that uses the ATTO R380 host adaptor). Inside the MAC Pro lives the ATTO R380 card and a 6 port ethernet card from Small Tree. Those 6 ports go to a managed ethernet switch, to create a link aggregate “bond”, which is a big fat data pipe, dramatically faster than regular ethernet. Once this is established, you simply plug in your MAC’s to this same ethernet switch, change some of the settting in the System Preference>Network control panel, and now you have shared storage. This solution uses nothing more than Apple File Sharing to do the file sharing between the FCP clients and the server computer. It’s really very easy.

Bob Zelin