[Aaron Ray]

Bob,

I know I put a lot out there, and I am very impressed with your quick response time, but I think you missed a couple of things I said, such as knowing that SMB in OS X is ***expletive deleted***, to put it mildly. I think you also overestimated the budget.

The whole shebang cost a little more than $9,000… That includes all the 10 Gb networking hardware, cabling, storage, and even a nifty little slide-out rack mountable keyboard & mouse. The server can have another 20TB added to it with just another card and drives dropped in, and as it is its internal benchmarks are fast enough to sustain 4k 24p 8 bit YUV uncompressed.

Whenever I benchmark the network throughput from one system to another I *do* get numbers in the 250 – 350 MB/s range (using iSCSI). If things must stay iSCSI in the production environment then the appropriate license will be purchased and that will be that. What confounds me is why it will still occasionally drop frames.

My client asked for a system that could do 4K ProRes422HQ to two suites if pushed, or 1080p30 ProRes422HQ to up to 8 workstations if they have a rush. When I run benchmarks everything looks good, and then when I try to stream stuff from the timeline in FCP I get dropped frames, even with extremely low bandwidth demands, but only very occasionally, and otherwise it’s not even close to struggling. CPU usage on the server stays around 9% even under heavy load, and all the RAID array statistics available in Adaptec’s monitoring software are totally in the green.

Granted, if we had to swap out for a Mac Pro only a fraction of the initial hardware wouldn’t be transferable, but I was posting here hoping for something a little more constructive than “gut it”.

It’s close. I just need to nail down the gremlins. Fixing the TCP fragmentation got me a good part of the way there, for instance.

Constructive thoughts?

– /aron
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ARC Systems Consulting – Brooklyn, NY