[Ed Murphy]

Thank you both, Tom and Martin!

Martin, that is great news, as I am currently using the demo of YoYotta and liking it. I was able to fully restore a Cache-A tar LTO5 tape with it, but to be able to access and/or recreate our existing catalog would mean a world of difference!

Tom, I will certainly pursue that suggestion with you depending on or in tandem with what Martin has to say about my catalog file.
I’ll email you each with my specifics by tomorrow at the latest.

I will also follow up here for others with any interesting results we find.

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Hi Tom,

Do you know of any way to recover/export the catalog without using the Pro-Cache?
Ours kicked the bucket too and it will not boot, nor can I restore it with the recovery USB stick, but I do have a backup of the .tgz catalog file.

I really want to be able to find some way to still search our catalog, instead of having to manually restore 100+ LTO5 tapes in order to recreate it.

Thank you!

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Hi Tom, thank you very much for your response and offer to help!

I’m generating the log file for you now, but please note that in attempting to resolve this issue, I have been deleting the irrelevant tapes from the catalog in hopes that would take it’s out of it’s ‘infinite loop’ of wanting to span to another tape. I believe it looks like there is one still in there that I just attempted to use, so maybe that helps. I can continue to recreate the error and send you an updated log after several more attempts if you think that’s helpful.

We have about 134 tapes in our catalog (67 plus their duplicates) and they are all tar, not LTFS.

I’ll gladly turn off tape spanning because I’ve never used it and I don’t want to – I don’t trust it. I have always staged my volumes in 1.4TB chunks so they each fit nicely on one tape.
But I don’t see where to turn it off… Is it the ‘Multiple Volumes’ option under that main configuration settings?

Thank you!!!

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Hi Nick,

I would be interested in your findings. We elected to shelve the idea of getting a more expensive switch to try and achieve a 10G uplink to the QNAP – mostly because I couldn’t find anyone to definitively confirm that would work. But, we are still within our 30-day return window!

Have you successfully connected your switch to your 879 via 10G and with multiple clients on the 1G side of the switch? What kind of speed enhancements have there been, if any?
I’m very interested to hear about your experiences.

Thank you,

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Thank you for the great information, Bob. I read the thread you linked and appreciate having a better understanding.

It seems most points suggesting it wont help performance are citing the scenario of many clients talking to one server, and you said:
“Clients generally connect to one server. Hence, if you run link aggregation on a client, this one socket (conversation) will run over one of the ports. You might see some traffic on the second port if you’re also checking e-mail or viewing web pages, but you won’t see 2X the bandwidth to the server. Some people implement link aggregation on clients, but it’s primarily for redundancy (fail-over capability).”

However, in our environment we have several clients connecting to 2 or 3 servers, (NASs) and sometimes to each other. If my clients were link aggregated, would that offer the occasional performance increase when dealing with multiple connections, just as it does on the NAS side with multiple clients wanting to connect?
I totally understand now that I’m not doubling my throughput over any one connection, but it seems like this would still be a minor performance boost in our environment.

If nothing else, there’s really no down side to doing it if I have the ports and the coper anyways, right? I mean aside from my time spent of course, but then, heck we’d have fail-over too…

Thanks again for everyone’s input!

I also have a related question.
Could I uplink via 10GbE to one of my NASs to at least improve performance to/from that node? I originally thought uplinks were only meant for other switches.
What I imagine in asking this question:
Our largest NAS is the Qnap 879 Pro, which has the option to install a 10GbE NIC for about $300. I was previously looking at 24 port HP 1810 series switches, however those don’t appear to have 10GbE uplink options. If I were to instead go with one that does appear to, such as the Cisco 2960-S line, or something from Small Tree, could I theoretically uplink via 10GbE to our 879 Pro for greater performance of at least that media storage to the rest of the network?
Forgive me if this is an ignorant question.

Thank you again for your thoughts.

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Thank you, Eric.

I suspected it was something like this, and Petros Kolyvas just gave me the “one train can’t ride on two tracks but two trains can” analogy in another forum’s old thread I had revived asking the same question.

So my follow up question is: If I easily have the means to do so since I’ll be upgrading switches anyways, is it totally pointless to set up link agg on the four MacPro clients I have? Or is it possible that would be helpful in scenarios other that a single file transfer?

It sounds like it would possibly help in situations where one workstation was sending or receiving data to multiple NASs or other workstations in terms of a file transfer or similar. Is it also possible though, that the OS/network/NLE (PPro in this case) would be smart enough to use those multiple links when working with multiple sets of media? Perhaps only when that media is in different locations?

Thank you again for any thoughts.

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Thank you for the detailed response, Petros.

That all makes sense, and yes I forgot to mention I use jumbo frames wherever possible. It makes very little difference if at all, but I like to have it on in principle.

I’m sure we’re going to upgrade to a new switch anyways, at least to solve the bottleneck I have over the 1GbE uplink from one 8 port Netgear to the other, and also to allow us more ports in general.

Do you think it would be pointless to aggregate links on the four MacPros once it is easy for us to do so with the new switch because of the train analogy you described? It sounds like it would possibly help in situations where one workstation was sending or receiving data to multiple NASs or other workstations in terms of a file transfer or similar. Is it also possible though, that the OS/network/NLE (PPro in this case) would be smart enough to use those multiple tracks when working with multiple sets of media? Perhaps only when that media is in different locations? (Stations.)

Also, you said “Our setup here has one primary station sending out to three other edit stations, all on GbE. It’s certainly still a low-cost solution to a performance problem better solved by having the primary station on a 10GbE uplink”
Does this imply I could uplink via 10GbE to one of my NASs to at least improve performance to/from that node? I thought uplinks were only meant for other switches.
What I imagine asking that question:
Our largest NAS is the Qnap 879 Pro, which has the option to install a 10GbE NIC for about $300. I was looking at these 24 port HP switches: https://h17007.https://www1.hp.com/us/en/products/switches/HP_1810_Switch_Series/index.aspx however those don’t appear to have 10GbE uplink options. If I were to instead go with one that does appear to, such as the Cisco 2960-S line https://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/switches/ps5718/ps6406/product_data_sheet0900aecd80322c0c.html could I theoretically uplink via 10GbE to our 879 Pro for greater performance of at least that media storage to the rest of the network?

Thank you again for your thoughts.

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Hey Petros,

Thanks for your contributions. I wonder if you can speek to my recent experience with link aggregation and managed switches in a Mac environment? I tested and found what I think is strange behavior…

For a few years our setup has consisted of two Netgear GS108T “smart” switches, two Qnap NAS RAIDs for our media library, four MacPros, and two iMacs. The Qnap NASs are each connected to the switches with LACP link aggregation over two ports each.

Now, I’ve recently found poor network performance on those computers connected via the second switch which I assume is due to the bottleneck of only being uplinked to the first switch via one GbE port. I would like to resolve that, expand network capacity, and setup link aggregation on the four MacPros as you have described, by upgrading our switches. I’m looking at the HP ProCurve you mentioned as well as other Netgear and Cisco options.

However, I wanted to determine what kind of performance boost I could expect before purchasing, so I set up my MacPro with link aggregation and just did a few simple file transfer tests. I believe the results to be strange and I was hoping you might have some thoughts.

Both tests involved copying a 7.14GB file from the Qnap RAID to a local drive and back again. The results were the same in each direction.

Test 1: MacPro connected via single GbE port 5, Qnap connected via aggregated ports 1 and 2. (Current setup.)
Transfer rate in activity monitor peaked and sustained approx 80MB/sec, transfer took 1:41 time.

Test 2: MacPro connected via aggregated ports 3 and 4, Qnap connected via aggregated ports 1 and 2.
Transfer rate in activity monitor peaked around 200MB/sec and sustained approx 160MB/sec, transfer took 1:41 time.

So, while there appeared to be about double the network traffic from one case to the other, the transfer took just as long in both setups! I repeated this several times. How could that be?
Do you have any idea what might be going on?
Should I expect different results with a newer switch, like the HP for example?

Any insights are appreciated.

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Thank you for your insights, Eric.

I’m just now installing the evaluation components to do some real world testing. I’m pretty excited and I think it’s now very likely we will go forward with it…

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television

[Ed Murphy]

Thank you, Rolf.

I am now starting to read through the manual too, which is helping me understand it better. I hadn’t seen it available online before.

The capabilities are impressive as shown in those videos Bryce did. Unfortunately, as we find all too often, we are a “small” operation with the needs of a large one. I would love to utilize just about every feature Bryce demoed in the video.

Do you know why I may not have had a response yet to my eval requests sent to the sales email address on 7/24 and 7/31? I’d like to get my hands dirty…

Best,

Ed Murphy
Senior Editor / Technical Director
David Lynch Foundation Television