David Gagne
Forum Replies Created
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The best thing to do is really pay attention to what your specific requirements are. High bandwidth? Lots of clients? Lots of data? Mobility? Diverse softwares and uses?
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Hah. With ActiveSAN you maybe can do StorNext without having to spend too much time on your favorite hobby – CLI.
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You need a minimum of three nodes of a kind. It’s sort of like Rummy – you can have any number more than three of the same kind. Isilon has three node types:
S-Series (the S is for speed)
X-Series (the X is for crossover? middle of the road)
NL-Series (The NL is for… who knows? Dense storage, supposedly slower, but probably not much).For us, we don’t need more performance (weird, right?). We need more storage space. So NL series would make sense… but we’d have to get 3 of them minimum, and they are not cheap… We could add an X, but it would take like ten X’s to get that much storage…
As for bandwidth issues, I haven’t seen any yet! We just did an 8-cam record (DVC Pro 100) with 2 editors working, and it was great! The math is pretty straightforward, you get 2 gigabit ports per node (so 8 total for us). You can do whatever you like with them, but you’ll never get more than gigabit out of one port. Theoretically we could get ~8Gb/s out of this thing, but I’d need 8+ things maxing out their gig ports. Initially we didn’t know what we were doing and had almost everything hitting the same port. This obviously failed.
Honestly, I prefer SAN not just for performance, but for the direct native access with ACLs and all the mac goodness. We’ve had issues with permissions over and over again and have to make sure our mountscripts are pointing to the right places… It is a NAS after all.
Like I said, it’s biggest selling point is the OneFS and the ease of expansion. Need more space? Add nodes. Need more speed? Add more nodes or add a performance accelerator (more gig ports).
I think it could meet a lot of people’s needs very well, but for the cost (make sure to include annual support, it’s a killer!), why not build a wicked fast SAN? Need ethernet clients? Add a 6 port gig card to a mac pro…
Read about our recent 8-cam conference capture here: https://thegagne.com/2011/01/05/onething-2010-8-cams-2-edit-one-storage/
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“Isilon which requires much less maintenance and care than Xsan” — not true in my experience…
Their annual support is very expensive, and we’ve needed it for failed batteries and other difficulties. Yes you don’t need fiber, and you can get pretty decent aggregate throughput, but I wouldn’t purchase it for it’s ease of use. It’s Linux, so you’ll have to get used to CLI, also you’ll deal with NFS mount scripts, goofy posix permissions, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great technology. I think it’s strength is in expansion with it’s OneFS and the ability to just add nodes without worrying about it and it’s ability to handle all the data. For expansion, yes, it’s less complicated than XSAN for certain.
But… you have to grow with same-style nodes, which can be a pain. We have 4 X nodes, and if I wanted to add big-slow storage, I’d have to add an additional 3 NL nodes, not just one.
I can expound some more if you like. I think it’s some great tech but I don’t know if I like it for an edit solution.
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I’d shoot for hardware raid. $300 is cheap. You might consider using a SSD for C: and then have 4 drive slots available for your RAID… Throw in 4 nice drives and you’ll get some good speeds.
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2 Mac Pros, 1 iMac…
Bottom line the iMac will not be able to connect faster than 1GB Ethernet… So focus on the Mac Pros. How much storage do you need for active editing? How much for archive? Are you planning on adding more Mac Pros any time soon? If not you can probably just drop 10GB cards in both Mac Pros and have a wicked fast direct connection – put some good storage on one and you’re good to go.
Bob probably has some good ideas. Like he said this will cost you money, but it’s money well spent IMO to make those Mac Pros useful and save your people time.
I know with non-profits they tend to think of peoples time as cheap, but with skilled editors that time is valuable even if they are not paid much.
Shoot me an email, I’d love to hear about your non-profit and what you’re working on – davidgagne at ihop dot org
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Not gonna argue LTO vs Disk – just want to point out that LTO4’s life is actually around 17 years according to wikipedia, and most enterprise disks have a five year life, and with RAID you can be pretty secure. Oh, and your G5 definitely won’t be still going in 5 years… so…
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Why LTO? I mean if you’re looking to do this cheap just use SATA drives and stick them on a shelf like most cheapskates do? Do you have a large amount of data to back up? I mean for $1k you can buy 4 3TB drives to back up 12TB or 6TB and have two copies.
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The reasons not to use mail or other client (besides mobile):
Consistency and cutting down IT needs.
There are bugs with mail/google apps integration, and if your company does a lot of shared calendars etc that doesn’t work super well with iCal. It’s so much simpler just to support the web platform and not worry about all the glitchiness of clients.
When we were researching google apps as an option, most people said the transition away from exchange was much much smoother if they boycotted client setups. People soon didn’t miss their Outlook integration etc when they jumped all in on google apps.
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Recommend to your IT that they switch to google for their email rather than upgrading to a newer exchange. Our company did, and it was the best move ever. Saved us tens of thousands of dollars and SO many headaches. If they do though, it’s best if EVERYONE ditches outlook completely, and just uses a browser/mobile device to manage their email/calendar/contacts.
The only major thing missing is tasks, imo, and the benefits are huge! Any device, anywhere, no difficulty configuring clients, no exchange pain/stress.