[Caspian Brand]

Whose CX4 cards are you using in the Macs?

Is your PC server running a flavor of Windows?

Is it currently being used to store content in production?

Having someone just reconfigure what you have might be a challenge, as it sounds a bit home brewed, and Integrators may not be willing to take on support of hardware they didn’t spec out.

Bob’s recommendation of Yates and Parks looked promising, I’ve not worked with them myself, but I would trust Bob’s input here. I’ve done a lot of work with Tekserve, and they’re awesome to work with. I’m positive Tekserve or the other folks Bob mentioned would be more than able to build you out an FCP based SAN or Shared Storage system, I just don’t know if anyone is going to want to take on supporting a storage server they didn’t provide. Again, such is the challenge of your position.

Ultimately, if you want to repurpose your PC based Server to house central storage for Mac clients, it will need to support iSCSI Target mode or AFP (or both). Windows 2008 Server no longer supports SFM (services for Macintosh or AFP) without additional 3rd party software. Even with these changes there’s no guarantee you’ll get the performance you desire, as this will also be largely dependent on the configuration of the server’s RAID, CPU, and RAM.

When creating a shared storage system for high performance media demands it’s always best to cater to the dominant OS, in your case the Mac OS, which means the best approach is to stick to Native File Systems (using Fibre or iSCSI Targets) and Native File Sharing protocols (like AFP).

Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

What do you have and what are you trying to do?

Specifically, what RAID box?

what computers? # of Macs and # of PCs? purpose of each in your workflow?

What cards for the computers, GbE or Fibre Channel or both?

There are a number of folks in the NYC area that can help you out, but you might also want to provide some of us on the Forums a bit more details as well so we can point you in the right direction depending on your needs, there’s a lot of good knowledge and experience on here that can help you.

Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

That’s a pretty cool looking box. Usually such devices require separate volumes for iSCSI Targets than they do for NAS shares. They also don’t come with SAN sharing software, so you’ll need to add that or risk corrupting the iSCSI Target volumes.

If you have some spare unused storage to play with on that box, you’re welcome to download and try our SANmp software for free.

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/trysanmp.php

It doesn’t require a separate MetaData network, and you can access the NAS shares over the same port as iSCSI, getting the nice mix of File and Volume level sharing, store your media on the SAN volumes and keep project files, graphics, web encodes, proxies, etc. on the NAS. Cross platform SAN access to the volumes can be augmented by the use of Paragon’s HFS+ driver for Windows.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

Many NAS solutions use XFS formatted volumes, so the SMB/CIFS protocol is effectively the client to access that volume over “NAS” methods. Paragon has a block level file system driver for Mac ,ExtFS for Mac, but this would require a SAN approach to networking, and I’m not currently aware of anyone supporting this driver in that approach.

To what level is your cross platform workflow intent, and what editors are you using?

We have many customers including Win/Mac Avid houses sharing media over iSCSI with our EVO and SANmp products. I have seen a lot of customers mixing SAN and NAS topologies in order to create cross-platform workflows, which work very well.

Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

Niche Video Products in Marietta, GA.

Ask for Jon Foster.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

How is your Infortrend array currently used?

You listed that you have two Fibre Channel HBAs, are they both in the same computer, or in different computers?

The Infortrend array’s have a unique function of a built-in Fibre Channel Hub, so with the addition of some SAN management software, you could potentially start out by directly connecting your two Macs and share access to the same volumes. Using the Failover mode within the Infortrend might complicate this approach a bit as far as which ports to use, so it would be good to double check configuration recommendations there. Also, I’m pretty sure there is no automatic failover support on the Mac client side even with the Controller in Redundant Failover mode. Reassignment would have to be done manually.

Ultimately adding a Fibre Channel switch and SAN management software, such as SANmp, will provide the best long term growth of the system, but you can start off in HUB mode with some SAN sharing software if you cared to.

Some SAN clients can re-share their SAN mounted volumes over Ethernet, which can allow you to get by depending on how demanding your needs are, but ultimately having a dedicated server re-sharing access to the Fibre Channel based storage will provide the most networking options, and performance.

How many GbE clients do you have wanting to access this storage as well, and what level of contribution do you expect them to make?

If your other two FC connected systems are going to handle Uncompressed HD, there’s not going to be much performance left on the drives for much else.

Regards,

Caspian Brand
Studio Network Solutions

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/

[Caspian Brand]

I would be cautious about using different drives in the same RAID set, especially different drives of different sizes. Just because an array can accommodate some of these features, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for all cases. Mixing different drives in the same RAID set can lead to poor performance of that set when trying to edit media. Not all “off the shelf” drives are equal. The reason drive manufacturers make Enterprise and RAID edition versions isn’t just to charge more money. There are firmware considerations, and additional vibrational issues that can impact drives when put in larger arrays with other disks. For example a desktop drive purchased from Fry’s is designed to handle it’s own error reporting and correction, but an Enterprise drive from the same manufacturer purchased from New Egg, may need to relinquish that responsibility to the RAID controller. This is where you then have to be thorough about controller compatibility with the drives and so on, which takes a lot of time and resources to determine, increasing the cost of these models.

Adding drives at any time and expanding the existing array isn’t something that can just magically happen in an instant. Many devices require recalculating parity in this situation, which is just like rebuilding the array after losing a drive, so this can take time and impact performance during the process, vs. bringing a separate logical disk on-line independently and adding it as another volume to the SAN. There are pros and cons to both approaches.

-Caspian Brand
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/product_detail.php?pi=12

[Caspian Brand]

Are you importing the footage from a disk image of the original CF Card you shot on?
or
Did you copy it’s .MOV and .THM files to another hard drive?

I’ve found that FCP and the EOS Plug-In prefer to look at a disk image. When offloading cards I will mount the CF card on the desktop, rename it something unique for that shooting session (akin to a tape name), then open Disk Utility and create a Compressed Image of the CF card on my media hard drive. This way when I run Log and Transfer, it sees the device it’s expecting and properly transcodes the files, adding the Time of Day Time Code stamps and so on.

If you copied the files to a hard drive without creating a disk image of the CF card first, then you can trick it by first freeing up space on a CF Card, copying the directories and media files back, and then creating an image from the now full CF Card. Repeat the process for how ever many disk images you need to temporarily store all the media for imaging.

-Caspian

[Caspian Brand]

I recently did a shoot with a 5DMKII and a 60D, and found to my dismay that while in Record, the HDMI output of these particular cameras is reduced to 480p, and some monitors, like the Marshall V-LCD651STX-HDMI we got our hands on for the weekend, will squash the image making it nearly impossible to gauge focus. No matter what settings we put the monitor in, as soon as the camera was in record, the image was squashed as the camera switched to 480p output.

I would like to think that even at a reduced overall resolution, as long as it fills up the screen of the montior without squashing, it would provide better focus reference than the smaller LCD on the camera?

I would hope that Marshall’s 7″ Widescreen models of camera top LCD would maintain the proper aspect ratio when the cameras are in record. Anyone have any experience with these monitors and cameras? or have advice on good monitors to use with either of these cameras?

It seems most LCD monitors that mount to the camera have a max of 480p anyway. Personally I’m looking for the flexibility of a camera mount monitor to assist with obscure camera angles and moves that may be more difficult to reference with an EVF.

But then I stumbled across these guys in North Carolina:

https://www.smallhd.com/Products/DP6.html

Looks promising for higher resolution monitoring with cameras that support it, like I’ve heard the 7D does…anyone know if it’s output is 1080p or 720p during record?

-Caspian

[Caspian Brand]

Hello Bjarki,

If you are going to use your current in-wall cabling, you’ll want to ensure all the lines and patch points are capable of GbE speeds. Each client machine will need to have their own GbE path to your server or storage device, if you have multiple lines in the walls I would assume there are patch points at either end. Assuming these lines are GbE, they could be run through a switch or directly to your server or storage device.

Using the Small Tree card, a MacPro and CalDigit storage is really a BYON (Build Your Own NAS) setup, which is different from a SAN, in that you are relying on the power of your MacPro as well as the storage for performance to it’s network shares.

A SAN can use similar hardware, but would provide block level access to storage which is then managed by SAN software vs. built-in OS networking. SAN hardware doesn’t necessarily need as much CPU and RAM configurations that NAS setups require in order to gain multiple streams of HD video. Additionally, some NAS solutions require the use of Jumbo Frames for good performance, which the newer i5 and i7 iMacs do not support. SAN networking protocols like iSCSI do not have a major performance hit by the lack of Jumbo Frames like NAS systems do.

If you’d like, I can put you in touch with a customer of ours using our EVO SAN & NAS solution in Iceland. If you email me at: cbrand@studionetworksolutions.com I can put you in touch with them and you might be able to arrange to check it out in person.

You can also read more about it here:
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/product_detail.php?pi=12

We can do custom configurations with all GbE as well to help fit it into your budget, and still have the system be capable of Fibre Channel in the future should you need it, making it a more well rounded “future proof” solution.

Best Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions