[Matt Geier]

Hi Eric,

You should call me on Monday.

I’ll send you an email.

Thanks,

Matt

[Matt Geier]

Hey thanks for posting —

If I were you, I’d shoot over to the Small Tree forum. Over there you can find out about GraniteSTOR ST-RAID’s for Video.

Small Tree designs and qualifies Real Time Ethernet based Shared Storage solutions. For your little amount of people, and your smaller budget that cannot be made to spend 20K +, a GraniteSTOR would be a perfect fit, and it won’t cost you 20K, even for 16TB of Small Tree “real-time” qualified GraniteSTOR ST-RAID storage!

Go check them out!

Find the Small Tree Forum here —
https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree

[Matt Geier]

Hi Krysttian,

Reading your post, it’s like a lot of other posts out here that want to do shared storage and have real time shared editing access, but don’t understand the cost of WHY you need to spend that $2000 for the switch, or $7000 for a storage unit.

And, to boot, you have an even harder time, because you know you can buy these things for much less on your own search, and TRY this on your own.

But what happens when it doesn’t work?
Who do you call?
Where do you start troubleshooting what’s wrong?

Here’s the WHY you need to plan on 7-12K for what you are looking for;

Server with Multiport Gigabit / or 10Gb Ethernet Card:

A Multi Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter from Small Tree
(this goes into your apple server and will serve the clients with Gigabit connections / or serve a switch with a link aggregated connection for multiple clients…)
Price $700+

Switch:
A Managed Gigabit Ethernet Switch;
1) It must do Dynamic Link Aggregation
2) Jumbo Frames (some do it, but not well..)
3) You must know how to configure this. Also, if you have a problem and you’re doing this on your own, you must know how to make sure the switch is set up properly for a video network.

Small Tree has one for less then $1200. — ES4528V

Storage:
The Storage should be tested and qualified to support “real time” and work 100% of the time in a real time environment. If you are okay having a non real time solution that works 70/80% of the time, and you don’t mind being down that 20% of the time, you can go find the cheapest most inexpensive storage you can.

From your post, you’ve already experienced this “down time” enough already.

Or your best option, is to keep getting input from all these wonderful Cow people!

After you feel like you’re in over your head, or someone filling your head with “no you cannot do this with Ethernet” then you can reach out to Small Tree, and head over to the forum there and start asking more questions. Small Tree’s GraniteSTOR ST-RAID line is engineered and designed to specifications, and tested / qualifed by Small Tree to work under Shared conditions while supporting the needs for real time access.

You can find the Small Tree forum here
https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree —

Look forward to seeing you some more!

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

Anne,

Hi —

In my “technical” experience of doing support. Of all the hardware, there’s never been a time when I personally was required to unplug my external’s just to upgrade my o/s. (This is my personal experience….there are times however, when unplugging peripherals will help troubleshoot hardware problems, and potentially software problems also.)

I’m sorry to hear that you had the experience with the Snow Leopard.

What was the problem you had exactly when you had an upgrade?
What “driver” was it, do you know?

(Let us know what other information you know about the problem…)

—– From what I know about the great Apple, My hunch is that they (like many other companies) would not want people to have to unplug all their things just to do an upgrade. I’ve had extremely good experience with the o/s and their Hardware. ——– I cannot speak for them, or Snow Leopard. I’ll let someone else address you directly who has more experience about upgrades to Snow Leopard —

Let us know,

Matt

[Matt Geier]

Nick,

I want to lend you my two pennies here — this is my first official post using my small-tree.com address. Feel Free to come over to the forum we just got here on The Cow and we can connect there too (https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree)

Doing Uncompressed HD over Ethernet is hard, siomply because either there isn’t enough Ethernet bandwidth on a single Gigabit wire, 10Gb is expensive still in comparison to other options, or storage isn’t fast enough to pass the i/o quickly enough, in some cases, all three are a problem for most users trying to do this kind of work in a shared environment with two or three clients hitting the same storage box.

I’d like to point out that just because a device claims to have X amount of network bandwidth, does not mean it can successfully pass a real time video stream, one, two, or multiple times at once. As is the case with any storage, and it should be investigated as such from that vendor as to the “real time” conditions/requirements of their solution.

You said —
I dont want to start over with storage and by fiber channel stuff. The HD Pro’s work great.

REPLY —
This is true perhaps a Direct Attached Storage, however, it changes the dynamic automatically when you share the device and start hitting it with more then one client at a time (or more then one video stream at a time…Your raid performance can go through the floor when it’s being hit with more then one client in any condition…I’ve seen it several times before, especially in these video editing environments, and even is some non real time environments.

Here are some questions I would ask…

Have you connected this and successfully shared streams of video from it to more then one client at once?
How did it perform?
How many video streams can you pull from this device at one time?
What formats perform better then others?
How many / what video formats did you try?

You Said —

There is no efficient way to share media with HIGh bandwidth.

REPLY —

This is simply not true. I fyou have a network designed to do it, then that’s what it will do. But the caveat is that you have to afford the kind of equipment that has to supply the data rates and throughputs you are looking for.

For example, with Gigabit, I’ve personally witnessed Apple servers being hit with multiple gigabit and even 10Gb Ethernet clients and those servers can reach 600MB/sec +
(A six Port Ethernet Adapter, Link Aggregated with two internal Apple ports will effectively give you an aggregate capable of pushing and pulling 800MB/sec worth of throughput ….at full speed of course) — Full Speed is referred to as line rate.

You Said —
Right now I am just using gigabit and getting 70MB a sec between the two machines.

REPLY
That’s very normal… you are copying back and forth from Mac to Mac of Gigabit. The speed you are achieving tells us you have Jumbo Frames turned on. Otherwise these numbers would probably look more like 30-50MB/sec.

You Said –

What I don’t need is Multiple users hammering on the same files at once.

REPLY —

That’s likely referring to project files, as your media can be stored on the storage and shared across project folders. IN any event, I would be more concerned with multiple users hitting the same raid at once, which is where some of my above comments come into play. It’s not so much the access to the files, as it will be the performance of the raid that tells you if this is going to work with what you have now or not.

Let me know if there’s further insight I can lend you….

Regards,

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

Sean,

What kind of video Formats are the editors going to be using mostly? The different formats require different things in the response of the storage.

You’re going to want a 6 port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter from Small Tree. This will provide the network bandwidth you’ll need for the entire workgroup.

The server will need to be an Xserve or a Mac Pro (Preferably the newest Mac). With the Small Tree card installed you’ll have two additional ports. If you want some kind of network access to the server, use one port. You can serve about 600-800MB/sec of bandwidth (6-8 Gigabit Ports)…..

You’ll want a Managed Switch — one part of it dedicated to the video editors and another dedicated to the vfx traffic. Again I suggest Small Tree’s Edge-corE switches. They work very good in a Video environment.

(Be careful about the storage) All I can tell you here is that your video formats require different speeds of response times with the storage. Not only will you need some high performance storage you will also be looking for “FAST” storage — You need fast access for the video editing, and the additional hits that will be coming in from the vfx people will need to be addressed as well (These are typically going to be push/pull, not real time editing). The same storage can work if it’s fast enough and has enough “beefyness” to keep up with the entire workload.

Let me know if this helps.

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

Whos iSCSI Initiator are you using? I do not see that called out anywhere?

Did the support people you talked with simply tell you they would do nothing? (I would think if anything they would want to understand THEY do not have a problem……) or did they confirm all the hardware/networking/drivers/etc were all working correctly?

[Matt Geier]

John,

There is no such thing as a “dumb question” when you don’t know the answer to what you are asking! 🙂

[Matt Geier]

Todd,

Nice post, but I think you’ll find that spending 20K+ on a set up that will support you in the way you want, will be what’s expected.

Fibre Channel is still pricy after you start adding in client licenses, hardware, then redundancy for the whole thing.

4 or 5 people on an XSAN last I heard was closer to 15K by the time the configuration was done……

Now sure what FCP has for compression of 2K …..or if that’s even something people do….I don’t hear about compressed 2K much …

What I do hear about, is how local attached storage and sneaker net is still the alternative to those that cannot afford a Fibre Channel SAN due to price, and due to the fact they cannot do compression —

For those that are interested in doing compressed HD with the use of Pro Res, I would steer you toward an Ethernet based solution…

Regards,

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

No — it was your o/s at the time ..

There are Intel Xeon Macs that certainly contain 64 bit cores — but the O/S was the limitation due to the lack of 64 bit support.
(64 bit support has only become ever more apparent in the last 3-5 years …)

in May of 2004 SGI Realeased a 64 bit Hardware/Software configuration called the Altix 3000…. That was still fairly new in the realm of 64 bit architecture, but it used Intel Itanium (even before the ones in your Mac…) processors …. and the Linux Operating system was managing all the 64 bit hardware stuff …

It’s completely possible to have 64 bit hardware inside and never use it, because the o/s won’t do it. (cant use features, take advantage of special things etc…)

It’s completely possible to have a 32 bit hardware inside and never use 64 bit from the O/S because your hardware cannot support it…

In the case of Quad Core Intel Xeons… yes .. they have been installed in Mac’s for a while now, but until the new o/s came out, very little of the 64 bit technology/functionality could be taken advantage of.

The even newer Mac’s with Nahelem processors, are even better!