[David Gagne]

Yes they connect through a switch, but you can access the cluster through a specific IP address allocated to a single gigabit port. Of course you can do bonding etc., but it’s pretty easy to just segregate your traffic, which also means that file transfers won’t slam into a recording process.

Are you doing 32 channels of uncompressed or compressed?

-David

[David Gagne]

I’m mostly curious how much of the networking industry will leapfrog 10Gb, at least for uplink/data connections. Why? Because the cost isn’t THAT much higher with the major network players (who are already expensive for 10Gb).

You’re right, most of my stuff is 30MB/sec. But most of my files are 3+ hours long. Which means they still take a long time to transfer or process. If my transcode clients are 10Gb and have huge amounts of CPU, I believe each could saturate a 10Gb connection. Yeah I’m not doing that today, but who knows about tomorrow?

But you’re right, the bottleneck is currently the drive arrays. But I think that bottleneck will shortly be resolved by things like ZFS and memcaching/ssd caching or tiering.

I may have “done it myself” but I’ve also learned where it’s useful to buy something 🙂 You always get what you pay for.

[David Gagne]

Yeah, live ingest is no problem for us, because we’re using ProRes and DVCProHD.

But you should be able to upgrade to 10Gb if you needed uncompressed or something.

Our setup:

4x nodes, 2x 1Gb ports on each, for 8 total.
2x playout servers
2x capture servers
Each server is connected to a separate node (or sometimes I double up if I want to free up a node for edit).

For one event I captured 7x live feeds DVCProHD, while also allowing editors access. I posted it here somewhere in the forums, you can look up that report.

I use NFS as my protocol and use Softron Movie Recorder for capture. No problems with it. The only problems I had were with some wonky NFS permissions messing up my files, but once that was sorted it was smooth sailing.

Pretty cool, but in theory you should be able to do the same with a much cheaper system. Maybe if I had to capture like 16 channels while editing multichannel something like this might be worth it…

[David Gagne]

40gig is coming…

[David Gagne]

I’ve got an Isilon 6000x that I’m about ready to retire. 4 nodes, around 20TB total.

I’ve talked about it before… but I’ll do it again…

First, the good stuff:

• Single filesystem across cluster.
• Never had a performance problem.
• Very resilient – even had a node die and lost no data.
• Management UI is decent, and has realtime monitoring.

Next, the bad stuff:

• Fairly expensive, especially when you factor the ridiculous support costs (20%+ per year?)
• Support is slow. Some of my issues took weeks to resolve, and a couple issues are still unresolved.
• You need support. I had 3 NVRAM batteries go bad, and one raid card. Software updates require support. Any troubleshooting requires use of proprietary command line commands.
• NFS is not always ideal for editing, permissions get weird sometimes.

Who should buy it?
All in all, my experience has been kind of negative, but honestly, my company should not have bought it in the first place. Isilon is great for people who have huge amounts of data and can benefit from having it consolidated in one place, with a purchasing strategy that will take advantage of the increasing rewards of adding nodes. If you’re not working with half a petabyte, I’d look elsewhere. Four nodes of Isilon does not make good financial sense.

Final thoughts
Isilon IS expensive, but it is also some cool tech, but few and far between are the people who actually can take advantage of it. Also it seems like it’s being retrofitted for more typical IT environments with additions of features like iSCSI, Hadoop, VM integration, etc. If I had tons money and I had to pick ONE storage platform for the rest of my life, I might pick Isilon. Then again, I’m not sure I could live with their support.

[David Gagne]

I know it sounds silly but also check for file fragmentation and/or a nearly full drive. That can easily cause unnecessary slow down.

[David Gagne]

Good stuff Bob.

You also forgot [other brand retracted]. Oh wait, you said, “list of people that know what they are doing.” Ha. They do know magic tricks though, which apparently helps with their sales.

On another note, I’d pay Bob $5 to tell me which are his top 3 on that list 🙂

[David Gagne]

End user here (not a sales guy).

It seems your requirements are fairly low in terms of bandwidth. Are you on Mac or PC? How much shared storage do you need?

Facilis, GB Labs, etc are probably overkill for you, but worthy solutions if you have the money, as they probably are more “complete” solutions with support, etc.

For cheaper solutions that could do the job well, check out Maxx Digital’s Final Share or ProMax.

IMO you don’t need a SAN for those small requirements, get a NAS, but make sure it’s built properly.

[David Gagne]

Interesting. I’d love to hear more detail on how that expansion works.

[David Gagne]

Comparing products is generally how consumers make decisions. iPhone Vs Android, etc.

Small-Tree is often featured here at Creative Cow and is one of the NAS providers who seems very committed to media workflows and working out the challenges specific to video. I don’t own any of their products yet, but I’ve talked to their engineers who are very knowledgeable when it comes to video production integration.

Of course we could also compare to other media SAN/NAS providers such as Facilis, NexSAN, SNS, Rorke, ProMax, Isilon etc., but the features seem closest with Small-Tree’s Titanium 16 as a turnkey NAS solution.

So, let me compare basic features:

Nearly identical! That’s good though, because consumers like me like to have options (and blue IS my favorite color, haha).

Sad that I couldn’t get out to NAB this year to come check it out first hand.

Let me echo the OP, John Heagy, who asked “Has anybody seen a Space system in action?” I’m sure someone here at the Cow has it installed…