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Suggestions on partitioning a 12TB SAN???
I have a 12TB (usable) SAN. I’m looking for suggestions on the best way to partition it.
I realize this is purely objective, but I’m trying to draw on the experience of others.
Just to give you an idea of how we work.
We do about 7 1/2hr DR’s a month.
Then we do 5 short form DR’s (:30, :60 & :120’s) a month
and finally we do about 20 3-5 min segments that utimately get assembeled into a 30 min educational show.On the long & short form DR it can be as long as 8 months from begining(Digitizing) to completion (signed off by the cvlient and aired).
For the educational segments it is more like 2 months.My estimate is that the 1/2 hr DR’s will need about 250-300GB of space, and the short form DR’s and educational segments will only need about 50GB (if that much).
This is all being done in 8 bit uncompressed video.
The way we hae thing set up right now are about 35 270GB partitions that were intended to be used for 1 project only. What happened is we realized that we have more projects then partition so we started adding multiple projects to partitions. The problem with this is if 2 projects happend to be on the same partition and we want 2 different editors to work on them at the same time we can’t because only 1 system can write to a partition at a time.
(I’m not telling you anything you don’t know already.)We had 1 suggestion of creating 3 large partitions (1 for each editor).
My problem with that is if I start a project and then editor B needs to complete it the project needs to move from my partition to his (so we can both write to our own partitions).Another thought was to have 2 large 3.2TB partitons for our Capture Scratch (Media) that the ingestions stations will write to and everyone else will read from and then have smaller 50GB partitions for projects that will be form the sequence, Livetype files, Moton files, and anything else that is not digitized. Also our Autosave, and Render files to go to these small partitions. I like this because we it comed time to purge the project all I have to do is delete the media off the large Capture scratch partition and burn everything on the small project partition (minus the autosave and render files) to a CD or DVD.
I would apprercaite any other suggestions before we make this decision.
Steve Cohen
Senoir Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
3 Replies
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Hi Steve,
Our beast is managed by Artbox.
I work on a system thats 180TB with around 40 users. The, so far, solution to this huge beast and all it’s users is to give all the users, 4 on-line editors, 7 graphic designers, 25 producers and 4 technical ingest assistants a Portable Home Directory. This is a remote, virtual kind of log-in which gives you permission to write to your partition of the san but not to others. In this directory you can store projects and files but no media as such. The ingest staff write all the media to a big partition of the san, this sits in Artbox as an asset which is picked up by the producers who rough cut their sequences which in turn are picked up by me or one of the other on-line editors to grade and finish. The beauty of it is that if a job I had started had to be picked up by someone else all they would have to do is open the project from my PHD, et viola! I have copies of each project stored in my PHD along with my AutoSave vault, along with my waveform and thumbnail caches. The render files sit on the san in their own folder. I’ve had no bother about read/writing to the san’s media volume even when there has been quite a few of us on-line.
You also need to think about RAID security. Here’s part of our set-up…
Raid 5 for data storage and data volume has 16 XRAIDS
3 XRAIDS for Archive
1 XRAID for Metadata/Journal which is RAID 1
Hope that gives you something,Enge
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Thanks Enge;
This sounds like it may work, but it also sounds like it may be more than we need.
I want to look into Artbox a little furter to see if it fit our needs.
What is the company that makes Artbox? I did a search on google, but to many alternatives came up.The SAN is 4 3.2 TB Raid 5 Raids and we currently use FibreJet by Command Soft for assigning drives to projects.
The 6 G5 Mac’s that are on the SAN, are not connected to the internet, or our internal network because our COO/CTO is paranoid and afriad of hackers or viruses. I know what you are going to say, but trust me I’ve brought it all up to him before and it’s like beating a dead horse he has his mind set on keeping it isolated.
Please keeping adding suggestions. I need more input before I can come up with a suggestion that will make him happy, make it easy for me to maintain and backup and finally work for us.
Thanks
Steve Cohen
Senoir Editor
O2 Media Inc. -
Hi Steve,
the company you’re after are called Proximity; you can get them here: http://www.proximitygroup.com
The whole thing about internet access reared it’s head with us but we convinced them, working for a broadcaster we’ve got a pretty thick wall blocking us in, we hope! We tend to have more problems with internal networks and DNS servers believe it or not…
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