Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[alex gardiner] “While you say forget performance, (as you know) it is always a requirement to consider the application alongside utilization and reliability?”
Thanks Alex. You’re right, performance is always a factor, as is efficiency (ratio of performance and usable capacity to TCO).
My personal quest in this is to figure out which one is more reliable – 6 or 10, and why, using good math models supported by stats. RAIDZ – for me personally – falls outside of it as it’s not supported by popular RAID controllers I use. That said, I am not opposed to discussing it.
[alex gardiner] “In turn, if we are forgetting performance all together, would we consider technologies such as RAIDZ? Removing the controller itself might not be the worst idea?”
Just for the purpose of this thread, I’d like to center on a perhaps quite theoretical question of what industry standard RAID level is the most reliable – along with why and by how much.
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Amount, certainly – especially if it’s a 64-bit version of Vegas Pro.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
RAID6 is vastly more reliable than 5; Areca Thunderbolt boxes (ARC-8050) are great. Don’t have a benchmark in front of me but it’s the range of 600-700MB/s in RAID6 with 7200rpm drives.
It’s $1499 with no drives; with eight 4TB WD RE enterprise class drives it’ll run about $5.5K (usable capacity ~ 24TB) from Areca initialized and formatted; $500-700 less if you buy your own; about $700 less with 3TB drives; much less with desktop (not enterprise class) drives.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Can you see if “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Premiere Pro CS6\Adobe Premiere Pro.exe” exists? When you try to run it from there, what happens? Any other CS6 apps start? (Encore?) The simplest advice is of course to reinstall Pr however before that it’d be good to check that the file system is healthy.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Had about a week of training on EqualLogic arrays (somewhat similar to Isilon), and it’s just a different animal from DAS, NAS, SAN boxes that I was used to.
Like David said, expandability: not just the petabytes, but how it’s done. Add a chassis full of drives (to the iSCSI subnet), sign in to management, add it to the pool. You’re done. You could still do a few things but the main idea is that its capacity is instantly available. No RAID expansion, no adding controllers and HBAs, no restarting the system.
Resiliency. If your primary chassis goes up in smoke, sign in to management (yes, it’s transparently available through surviving members of the group), add or order a spare chassis, keep working as if nothing happened. Try that with any regular DAS, SAN or NAS.
There’s a bunch of other things that enterprises often need: automatic snapshots, 1- and 2-way replication, tiering. All that costs a pretty penny, too, of course – five to twenty times the cost per GB vs. “regular Joe” DAS and NAS boxes.
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[Rob Wilson] “I would love to have a new setup where we just mounted one drive that included ‘both drives merged’ and then as the RAIDs fill I would like the ability to add new RAIDs to increase ‘free space’. Am I correct in thinking this is how a SAN works?”
Nothing to do with SAN per se. Spanning volumes is more of a storage space management function (not SAN, NAS, etc.), and is usually a function of a RAID controller or the OS.
So why not just span the volumes in the OS, into one storage space?
(look for “To create a spanned volume in OS X” here or in many other places)
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Brian Sarfatty] “My question is, what is the real world performance of eSata vs USB 3 vs FW800?”
If you’re talking about individual mechanical drives: eSATA and USB 3.0 are about the same since they’ll be both limited by individual drives’ performance: 130-150MB/s when empty, down to 50% of that when full.
FW800: 70-80MB/s.
USB 3.0 has the advantage of (a possibility of) using a hub.
With SSDs or arrays, the picture changes a bit: eSATA may have the advantage, USB 3.0 is slower unless UAS is used. FW800 remains the slowest one.
HTH.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
A few of my clients use shared storage with Premiere Pro.
It’s generally recommended to keep temp files (scratch, cache) on the fastest storage available – both in terms of latencies and transfer rates. Have you benched your SAN storage for latencies (IOPS) and transfer rates? If it’s faster than your local storage, then you could keep all there, provided those temp files aren’t being written to by someone else at the same time.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[peter tours] ” I was concerned over whether the jump from 3 to 6gb/s and 32 to 64mb cache would be tolerated.”
Far as I know, 3G vs. 6G is a non-issue as either bus is much faster than the drive’s media transfer rate. Fast spinning drives like WD RE and Ultrastars transfer at about 160MB/s while SATA 3G tops out at about 300MB/s. Upping the bus speed to 6G does very little to improve performance – unless you’re dealing with external drives (port multiplier eSATA) or SSDs.
Just my two cents.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Awesome, thanks Jeff. (Met a couple of your coworkers at NAB, cool dudes; missed you there.)
I think the client already tried that (setting GPU acceleration to software), but I’ll email him to make sure.
Thanks again.