[Marcus Lyall]

OK. I’m back on this again.
We now seem to have a regular 5-9 computers hanging off the network.
Again, mostly rendering in AFX, but with some FCP on there too.
It’s all still working, but we have no in-house CLI wizard any more.
So we’re thinking about upgrading.

So here’s the new thought.

Part 1:

New small tree l3 managed hub with 10gb card. Can’t work out how much this card is.

Replace PEG 6 card with 10gb card in server. (only 4 cores in server)
Put more ram in server.
Stick PEG6 card in one of the edit macs to run as super-fast edit machine.

Part 2:
Buy atto r680 card.
Find 6GB raid chassis.
Put in large number of 3tb 6gb drives.

Recycle Proavio chassis and r380 card as local storage for other edit machine.

Any ideas how much of this is currently do-able / advisable?

[Marcus Lyall]

I have hooked up an LTO 4 drive (HP bought off ebay as Bob said) to a G5 via SCSI. We have gone through this in detail.
And it isn’t pretty.

My experiences.

You need an ATTO SCSI card. Which will cost you money.
SCSI is way slower than SATA for LTO drives. 60mb/s vs 80-90 mb/s.
Buy good cables. No, the best cables you can find.
Or better still, buy a SATA drive instead.

We bought Bru Server. Very powerful. Good value. But….
Nightmare. Took ages to figure out how to use it.
It’s built for IT tech heads.

Having run unix shell for days to figure out why it wouldn’t go faster than 20 mb/s, we got an IT guy in who told us to change our SCSI cables and connectors. Then we got 50 mb/s.

But we never managed to get a successful backup and restore system working with Bru. It was way too painful. Bugs. Unix scripts. Crap.
(Sorry Bru, but we gave you a lot of money and it hasn’t worked out!)

Then we got Archiware’s Presstore.
Better than Bru, but pricier. Easier to use. Way better than Retrospect, which installs noxious things on whatever machine it is running on.

But having done our office move, it’s spat the dummy. Now it won’t restore! Could be hardware or software. IT guy coming back.

My advice….

If you install an LTO4 you will make yourself personally responsible for all the data that you decide to wipe off all those hard drives.
Do you want this responsibility?

No. You don’t.

We spent WEEKS of wasted time trying to get this backup thing working.
Get an IT company to install it and make it work so you have somebody to sort it out when it goes wrong. Or this will take up a lot of your time.

Make sure the LTO’s are not the only backup if you want to get to your data quickly. All of our data is backed up on hard drives elsewhere. The LTO’s are in case of fire or acts of god.

Put aside 2 weeks of your life to make this backup thing happen.
And work out how you are going to back things up from now on.

I once said ‘buy cheap, buy twice’.
When it comes to backup systems, it needs to be

‘buy cheap, lose job.’

Good luck!!!

[Marcus Lyall]

We’re on LTO4. HP box with scsi.

Our take on it…

1) We’ve looked at Retrospect and Bru Server. Hated both.
Retrospect is pants.
Bru Server was really complicated and had lots of Gotchas.
Unless you like Unix shell scripts.
Haven’t used Bru Producer. Might be good. Was put off by the other Bru experience.

2) We ended up with Archiware Presstore. We really like it.
Pricey for multiple clients but rock solid and worked out of the box.

3) Buy a SATA drive, not scsi. It’s quicker.

4) Worth running the LTO4 drive from a spare machine. Use that G5 that didn’t work out as a server. Sticking a big backup drive on it is good.
So you can back up big projects from that, not your server.

5) Worth talking to someone about a proper backup strategy, rather than just launching into it. We spent weeks trying to get the thing working like we wanted it to. Hire someone to do this for you. It is a colossal time vacuum.

6) Allow a long time to back up your currently-overstuffed RAID. And all those stray Lacie’s you have hanging around. Like a couple of weeks. Quickest SATA drives are about 90mb/s. In practice, you’ll be lucky to stick three tapes a day in.

7) Think about a multi-loader. We didn’t, but now wish we did.
Cos then you can backup a few tapes at a time. This will speed things up.

8) We bought our HP drive on ebay. It works. People do sell ’em cheap.
Worth a look.

Good luck.

[Marcus Lyall]

dunno if last post came up.
Switch is a Procurve 2810 24g.
Lots of CLI boffinry needed to make it play properly.
But it works…..

[Marcus Lyall]

The switch is a Procurve 2810 – 24g.

A false economy it turned out.
Not easy to configure, unless you happen to have a hardcore server network specialist with a spare week on his hands. Which we did.
Not user-friendly and no help from HP.
In retrospect, cheaper to buy a switch that wants to play nicely already.

But it has worked pretty well. System has been up for 8 months.
A few hiccups where you can’t connect to the server and have to reboot the client machine, but fairly occasional. Acceptable considering the low(ish) cost.

We were wondering about running 10gig into a switch and getting a bunch of single/double gig-e lines out of it. But no idea if there’s something out there that will do this……
Is this what you were hinting at?

[Marcus Lyall]

The dual 2ghz g5 with pci express slots.
For some reason, it used up huge amounts of CPU. Like 90% of both at all times. Whereas it only used about 10% of each core on a quad core mac pro.
Other people I know have had the same issue using g5’s as servers. No idea why.
It doesn’t work.
But we are using the g5 to run our tape backup system, which it does really well.

My advice….
You’re doing the right thing by building this. I don’t know whether you’ll get 6 edit seats running from it. You’ll defintely get at least 4. But getting the Ethernet switch configured properly was the hardest bit for us. Look through this forum and get the best switch you can. And try to find someone who really knows about networking, because configuring the network is not easy.

I did it myself, with the help of a very geeky friend who used to set up massive networks. It still cost me about the same as buying it as a package from a reseller. As I said in another post…. If you buy cheap, you buy twice.

[Marcus Lyall]

We tried the G5 and it doesn’t work.
Mac Pro with 8gb of ram is the way to go.

good luck!

[Marcus Lyall]

Quick update.

The ghetto San (not so ghetto now) is still rocking.
It’s currently serving 8 Mac Pros.
Most of them are running after effects, but normally 2-3 are editing HD Pro-res. We are not pushing the bandwidth too much however.

We’ve even packed it into flight cases, shipped it to the US, had British Airways lose it, got it back, plugged it in, and it worked first time.Used it for two weeks. Then shipped it back, plugged it in, and it’s still going strong. Touch wood.

A few issues, here and there. Interestingly, half the machines are running jumbo frames and half not. And it makes no difference despite the warnings not to do this.

The Macs are all configured to run the video server on one ethernet port, and the internet on the other.

Occasionally, you can’t see the video server, in which case, relaunching the finder seems to do the trick.

So all in all, it seems fairly robust. But we have put in a serious backup plan just in case.

[Marcus Lyall]

Hi there,

I’ve got a similar setup.
Having got an LTO4 drive, we went through hell getting it to work.
We’re just about there now. Tried to do it on the cheap. Don’t.

First we bought Bru Server. Paid a lot of money. Spent ages configuring it. Lots of having to use Unix scripts to optimise buffering. Basically, it sucks. Boffin interface. Buggy code. Support who treat you like an idiot if you can’t run Unix shell scripts.

Then we tried the new Retrospect. That sucked too. As ever.

Then we got Archiware’s Presstore. Our IT guy recommended it. We like it. It works. It does max write speed without needing configuring. It backs up. Paid the IT guy to make the problem go away.

One other thing. Don’t buy a SCSI LTO4 drive like we did. The SAS version is way quicker.

Most of our projects come back on a yearly cycle, so we keep a live backup of everything. Each major project (normally 4-6 tb) we buy a Raid 5 4-bay enclosure. And run a Chronosync backup off the server every night. When the project is more or, the drive goes on a shelf and gets spun up every few months.

And we also back up to tape. To eventually take home. Costly, but we hardly ever use video tapes, so if you lose it, it’s gone.

Spend the money on getting the backup right. You will sleep at night.

[Marcus Lyall]

Glad to return the favour Bob.

M