Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Matt Geier] “LanTest for OSX – Bandwidth and Read/Write benchmarking”
Thanks Matt! I’ll pass your post to my client. Not sure he still needs to do benchmarking for this project, but I am sure it’ll be very useful at some point.
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Thanks Matt,
Both the client and I are big fans of Small-Tree; ended up getting quite a few Small-Tree PCIe and TB NICs.
The 10GbE Netgear switch works for the purpose though: a little more performance for not a lot of money. Any other 10GbE switch would be quite a bit more money, and thus unsuitable, i.e. the client would have stayed with plain vanilla GbE.
If it was anything mission critical, I am sure sure the client would have looked at Small-Tree switches, as well.
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Hi Alex,
You probably know more about this than I do (but hide it better :)) – I just want to follow this discussion and see what comes out of it, and perhaps ask a few questions…
[Alex Udell] “As we are comping and not editing and, what’s the measure of performance?”
The only fool-proof measure I know of, is matching current and anticipated demand – so somehow, however difficult it might be, gotta measure that demand. Other than that, it’s throughput, I/Os and latencies (the latter two being related) – can’t think of anything else.
Have you tried figuring out the demand for I/Os and throughput – per client and aggregated?
[Alex Udell] “What raid configurations?”
Why, RAID10 of course… It’s a cure for all ills… Kidding! 🙂 Depends on quite a few factors, not the least – desired performance. Most popular options in single tier storage are 6, 10, and single or dual parity variants of RAIDZ. With a high demand for I/Os and low latencies, RAID10 comes to mind – but it’s relatively inefficient; if 6 works for you, I’d choose 6.
[Alex Udell] “We are inside of a larger organization, should we consider secondary HBA’s or NICs and put ourselves on an isolated groups for media traffic?”
Probably the best option; subnets on VLANs and/or dedicated hardware would also work, depending on the configuration. The idea is to ensure that those local packets get routed locally rather than through the main rack. If there is an option to talk to your local IT people and ask what they would recommend to ensure local routing for your network segment, I’d do that first.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Walter Soyka] “Alex was talking about Win-Tab, not Ctrl-Tab or Alt-Tab — that’s a different way of switching apps.”
Thanks Walter – exactly… Ctrl-Tab, Alt-Tab and pretty much all the other Windows keyboard shortcuts stay the same. Windows-key-Tab is a cool way to cycle through running apps in 3D-esque way that dazzles onlookers… 🙂
The few things that are different:
– Need to click on “Desktop” on a fresh login to get to your regular desktop. If you hibernate (“sleep” your system) w/o logging out – not even that. 8.1 is supposed to give you an option to boot straight to desktop. Apparently some users didn’t like Win8 quilt interface – and Microsoft listened – image that!
– getting to apps that aren’t pinned to your desktop or taskbar: searching for and finding them is a bit different than in previous versions. Not difficult – just different.I can’t think of anything else although I am sure there are a few things.
Things Win8 does better:
– touch of course, including trackpad gestures. Not yet a killer feature in editing but will be soon
– multi-monitor support
– storage (storage spaces, VHD boot, activity monitoring)
– power management
– networking (SMB3 for instance)In other words as long as your apps are supported on Win8 (few aren’t) – there is little to be said in favor of staying with Win7 other than the familiar interface.
3DS Max 2011 isn’t officially supported (of course they want you to upgrade to 2013) – yet it looks like the issues are limited to graphics drivers. I.e. it can be made to work w/o major pain.
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Hi Joe,
CS6 works fine on my Z800 with Win8 Pro (upgraded from 7 in June) – but then I haven’t done any extensive testing.
Win8 Pro has one feature that nailed it for me: client Hyper-V. It’s useless to most editors but to tinkerers like me, it’s priceless for testing various OS installations from XP to WinServer 2012 and apps on them. You could have twenty Win7, WinServer, XP, Linux instances all running simultaneously and smoothly, provided you have gobs of RAM.
I also really like the revamped Win8 Task Manager which offers a much more granular and easier to understand view of system resources – especially disk I/O. It’s not a huge benefit, but little things can go a long way. Win8 quirks aren’t a big issue for me: I don’t use its native full screen apps, the extra click to get to your regular desktop isn’t an issue, and while I miss the Aero scheme and Win-Tab task switching, I don’t weep over it.
Generally Win8 has a lot of improvements in several categories: touch, virtualization, server management. None of that is critical or even important for editors, so it’s a wash. Yet if you can suffer through its few quirks – the upcoming 8.1 is supposed to make that suffering slightly easier, and eventually touch will be another killer feature – I can see it being one in Photoshop.
HTH.
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[David Miller] “Our eMAM system has full MAM features”
Thanks David. I asked a bunch of questions earlier in the thread. Would you be able to answer any of them?
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[Dave Helmly] “8 lane card.”
Still looks like a 4-lane card. An 8-lane card like ATTO R680 has 11 plus 38 pins on one side. The one you’re showing – almost certainly around 20 on the large connector, making it a 4-lane card.
Thunderbolt in itself is a 4-lane PCIe protocol, although that doesn’t stop the OEMs from putting it on an 8-lane PCB.
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Looked like a 4-lane card to me.
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Mario,
Based on what you told us thus far, even a K5000 is an overkill: none of your current apps use GPU acceleration, and a $50 card will likely perform the same as a $2K one. Once you upgrade to CS6 or CC, it’ll be a different story.
Either Walter or I could have saved you a couple of thousand dollars tailoring your configuration to your workflow and goals, to be both effective and future proof. So perhaps next time your order a system, give it at least a few days before the order and maybe even (gasp) hire one of us? 🙂
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Mario League] “I made my order yesterday and the card I order is the 2.5GB Nvidia Quadro 5000. It has 352 CUDA cores which I hope it perform well and with the six dual cores too.”
Please not Quadro 5000. At least K5000, better yet – K5100 (don’t think that one ships yet though). If K5000 or K4000 are not available on your T7600 configuration, get it graphics-less and install a card after the fact: one of the decent GeForce cards (GTX-760, 770, 660Ti, 670, etc.) or Quadro K5000.
T7600 (and the just released T7610) are beautiful and very expensive machines, using a Quadro 5000 is akin to running Windows NT on it.