Jess Hartmann
Forum Replies Created
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Having a RAID controller (Hard RAID) maintain the stripe and redundancy patterns on the drive is the better of the two choices. Although it will generally be a bit more expensive, the key factor is that these systems have a dedicated CPU on the RAID controller which offloads your primary CPU. This is important mostly because of safety and secondly to performance.
There are conditions (although rare) where your primary CPU (Mac Pro) cannot dedicate the resources when required to maintain the RAID. In these cases software RAIDs are more susceptible to corruption. In addition, when software RAIDs have to wait on CPU resources from your primary CPU, performance can suffer.
Hope that helps.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Arvid,
You may want to consider the workflow we created for the ProMAX Platform Portable. I thought I would chime in here because we built the device precisely for the kind of workflow requirement you mentioned. The Platform Portable will allow you to connect your Thunderbolt RAID directly to it, and then connect your macs to it as well thru 1GbE or 10GbE. The device basically lets you to turn your attached storage into shared storage and if you Thunderbolt drive(s) are fast enough, you can eliminate the push/pull workflow and edit directly off of them from multiple workstations.
more information here: https://promax.com/products/platform-portable/ MSRP $5,995. No per seat license all included and comes with asset management built in.
Just one more consideration to get collaborative workflows more affordable. I hope this is helpful.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Mark,
You actually don’t necessarily need a SAN, but you do need a shared storage system that is designed for video. We have a team of consultants here and a network of resellers that can go thru a workflow consultation to make sure you get the right solution.
Let us know if we can be of assistance.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Mark,
I think the obvious question here is what do you mean by affordable? There are many solutions on the market that address these needs. Many of them are listed here on the Creative Cow including my Company, ProMAX Systems.
The other question is do you need a SAN or a NAS. The capabilities of these two technologies have been converging in the last few years putting a lot of price pressure on high cost SAN solutions.
Adobe Premiere Pro will work effectively with either technology, SAN or NAS. Based on your needs, prices in the market generally start at $10K and go up based speed, capacity, number of workstations and other workflow enhancements.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
David,
Although you may not have had the same results, in my experience and I think a great deal of my colleagues, SAN’s are by no means problem free technology. There are Pro’s and Con’s between SAN and NAS yet the differentiation is disappearing year after year. There are applications where SAN’s are a better fit, however, that is changing. Other than a few remaining hold outs, almost all editing applications now support NAS connectivity for shared storage. And as Bob mentioned, most shared storage vendors in this space now have a NAS offering. If it wasn’t what the market wanted, these vendors wouldn’t go there.
Regarding your concern that the tuned protocol ties you to vendor support, it’s true. That’s the trade-off you get when you buy instead of build yourself. For most people, it is a reasonable trade-off. For some, they would prefer to tune the system themselves. In essence, these individuals prefer to replicate what most of the vendors do with a staff of engineers who understand the core protocols. Most of the time it’s costly and frustrating.
That said, I doubt that any SAN solution you purchase lessens the burden of vender reliance. If the SAN goes down and requires support, you’re in the same position. Unless you build a system yourself and have the technical capabilities to fix it, it seems to come down to what systems are inherently more stable.
In my experience TCPIP protocol is no more volatile than any other technology (Fiber Channel with SAN Layer included). We have been building and supporting both SAN and NAS solutions for a decades and the failure and problem rates are about the same. Frankly we had more problems with XSAN permissions than we ever had with our tuned NAS solutions.
User serviceable parts are available for almost all of these solutions. And for some, including ours, drives as well. Spare kits can be purchased for key hardware components including power supplies, controllers etc.
I think the key point here is that the vendors that play in this space collectively have many thousands of specialty NAS based video systems in place and that number is growing. We are not seeing the same trend in the SAN field. And the key is specialty. A generic NAS system cobbled together will perform poorly and inconsistently. That’s why companies like ours are in business.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Hi David,
Your question is applicable and I think a good one to explore. Although TCPIP protocol was designed to carry traffic over wide distances, it can be tuned to work for video. The VAR’s that have successfully done this have been able to create mission critical systems that perform well for video. Some of these systems can even out perform traditional fibre channel SAN based solutions.
To your question, one of the reasons an ethernet solution can be successful in our environment is that in many ways it has less moving parts than a traditional block-mode access SAN. The ability to perform ‘file-locking’ through the higher-level protocol SMB / NFS can have a great many benefits over the overhead of a metadata controller. This is the key difference between the two technologies and they both have their positives and negatives. That said, a properly constructed NAS with 10GbE optical connections and the correct protocol stack can blow away many SAN’s at a fraction of the price.
Of course the key is getting a system (and a system builder) that understands these technologies at the protocol layer and is capable of creating the unique capabilities required for streaming video. It’s not rocket science but it can be challenging. As for it changing all the time, I don’t believe that is true. Apple and Microsoft tend to throw a curve ball at us every once in a while, but we don’t find that happening frequently.
Jess Hartmann
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Yes, I do believe this is a single CPU system. The E5-2600 V2 is a 12 core (24 thread) Chip. I don’t think there’s enough room for 2 CPU’s.
How important will firewire be for existing users? T-Bolt to PCIe expansion bay in order to plug in FW drives?
Jess Hartmann
CEO
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com