[Matt Geier]

Fabio,

Have you checked with ATTO by calling them or getting any kind of phone support?

ATTO Model No. ESAS-R380-000 Supports Snow Leopard. (from their website)

I would simply call ATTO or go ask them directly…

[Matt Geier]

I think it’s going to be a while then buddy! 🙂

[Matt Geier]

Bill,

Bob is right, you can do what you want to do in ProRez and edit in in real time over Gigabit or even 10Gb Ethernet.

When you hire Jordan Woods (Another Good Suggestion by Bob…) make sure he gets you into a Small Tree GraniteSTOR ST-RAID solution for your Final Cut Shared Video Editing (*hint hint)

This is serious business and you need to do your due diligence to find a solution you are comfortable paying for, and working with in the long term, not something you’ll need to junk 6 months from now because you have new project requirements.

Matt G.

[Matt Geier]

I can lend some insight here. Most of this knowledge comes from reading up on wireless technology, and some from being in a professional environment as a sales guy selling some of the wireless products that are on the market.

IEEE 802.11 is a set of standards carrying out wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication in the 2.4, 3.6 and 5 GHz frequency bands. They are implemented by the IEEE LAN/MAN Standards

Mbit – Megabit
MB – MegaByte

802.11a maximum net data rate of 54 Mbit/s

802.11b maximum net data rate of 11 Mbit/s

802.11g maximum net data rate of 54 Mbit/s

802.11n is a proposed amendment which improves upon the previous
802.11 standards by adding multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and many other newer features.

Most of your wireless connections (like the one you have in your house or office..) run at around the 54Mbit/sec. This translates to about 6.75MB/s. This could also decline on a per user basis very rapidly, depending on what is happening on the network.

A lot of the information here can be found on a wiki like – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#802.11n (this is specific to wireless specification 802.11)

As you can see, for video editing, nobody should be trying to edit video on wireless. It’s really not fast enough, and there’s really no way to guarantee bandwidth to users.

Hopefully this helps.

Thanks,

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

Jaime,

Your embarking on an adventure here. Traditionally, Fiber Channel environments require redundancy with meta data, and also a management overhead to keep things tip top. Not to mention SAN Software to play traffic cop for all the users, and then the fiber channel cards and licenses for each of your clients. (all very expensive…)

The truth is, you can spend a fraction of the cost on some Gigabit or even 10Gb hardware and implement a shared storage solution that can take advantage of what you already have built in (Ethernet), and save you further costs from an overhead perspective and a hardware perspective.

There are solutions available that work via Ethernet, and still allow you to take advantage of your Fiber Channel RAID that you have already. The one pitfall, is often times, people buy their RAID expecting it to do one thing, and find our it’s really good at doing much less then they thought. Why? – There’s several reasons…

Bandwidth is one
Often these raids have high bandwidth to support a lot of data transfer.

Disk latency is key if you ever intend on editing a lot of video at once. Most RAIDS are not designed for Low Latency Real Time performance. They are typically being designed to act in “push pull” environments, like your G-Tech Raid.

It’s likely it will edit DV25/50/Pro100 okay, but if you intend on editing ProRes off it, you may want to test that first before your under deadline.

If you like, consider doing some testing and see how you can fail your RAID. Point your Final Cut Pro to the storage, and start pulling down as many editing streams as you can, and use different formats (they will all vary, based on their own requirements..)

See where it fails, and find out if that’s okay with you.

If it is, great, you can use it because it makes you happy. Otherwise, use that storage for backup/archival, and invest in a Low Latency RAID that was designed for Video Editing under Shared environments. In these kinds of environments both Bandwidth AND Performance Latency are key, as are the rest of the components and how fast they communicate to one another.

If you’d like to investigate some proven solutions, I can help you. There’s plenty of info on the cow also, and there’s a lot of people out here that know what I’m talking about.

Let me know,

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1
Small Tree

[Matt Geier]

Neil,

Thanks for the kudos. I’ll consider that the start of our “beer tab” 🙂

I understand these hard times like the rest of the world too.

I think maybe you’ll want to end up giving me a call at some point and I can talk to you about some solutions I know of that are Ethernet based.

I believe you have my contact info already.

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1

[Matt Geier]

Ramy,

I was browsing and found your post.

There are solutions that work between MACs and PC’s. Mac’s use Apple’s AFP (Apple File Protocol) and PC’s (Windows use SMB, and Linux uses a Linux flavor of the “file transfer protocol.) My point is that it’s common for these to exists in the same environment because often they can “see” each other on a network.

AVID is a unique animal. I hear of a lot of complications integrating AVID into any other environment that’s not ALL AVID. I’m sure there’s stuff I don’t know here. But I do know that I’ve personally never witness more then one AVID in an environment like this. (One AVID, I hear, can be integrated much easier then say 2 or 3 etc … ) I don’t know much about this though, that’s just rumor. AVID does “special magic” in their solution so that only AVID can see AVID, etc ..

Pro Tools is also interesting and I’m willingly admitting here that I’m no expert on it. I do know that it has problems running over a network. All the Pro Tools users I hear of, have direct attached storage to meet those needs. I do believe that there may be solutions surfacing that will start to address these types of needs.

There are quite a few vendors that offer solutions that work in mixed environments. Often however, those environments are still comprised of individual solutions to meet specific requirements as your work flow continues, stops, and starts.

In this day in age, you have the ability to work with Gigabit, 10Gb, Fibre Channel, and other proven technologies to help you do what you want in a mixed environment. You need to make sure you’re working with someone who can understand your needs to ensure you’re getting the right hardware and the network you need in the beginning. Ultimately saving you in the long terms on costs for overhead to manage a network, etc etc etc…

Thanks,

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1

Matt G.

[Matt Geier]

Neil my friend,

I don’t like to bore people with technical jargon so I’ll keep this as simple as I can.

Furthermore, you’ve said it, yourself in the fact that it’s not “real time” which means you don’t really have to follow some of the rules you need to follow in order to get that kind of result you’d be looking for in a Real Time Video Editing environment.

Some additional things to know ..

Backups in their true form, are often run offline, or aside from the daily usage. Back when I was at SGI, we had a storage attach rate that was outstanding. Most of that storage was for backing up daily usage, offline. (high latency intensive… as apposed to low latency intensive for faster disk responses and faster raid controllers, back planes, front planes, etc..)

In an environment where you people doing mission critical work for your business, you just don’t want to have hiccups like bursts of backups occurring during “critical time”. The bottom line being, you’ll often find that its suggested to have your main storage (central storage) separate from your backup storage (offline storage).

Gigabit Ethernet is able to contain 100MB(MegaBytes) of data per second. Using Ethernet or not can be independent from the kind of storage you’ll pick. So establishing what kind of transfer rates and numbers you are looking for, need to be discussed first and foremost to decide where you want to start. Do you need to go 500MB/s or are you okay backing up your information at 90MB/sec .. or 160MB/sec … does it need to take an hour .. or can it take 5…. etc … you have to decide what you want to expect.

Ask yourself questions like what you have now, and what you expect it to be when it’s “improved” in your mind. Set your own expectation before someone else sets one for you and fails because it’s not what you thought it was.

Your idea of doing backup on Gigabit or 10Gb is completely viable. If you can deal with the speed in either case, and/or cost associated differences of Gigabit or 10Gb and then compare to a Fiber Channel NAS/SAN solution.

The likely hood of a Storage RAID being able to use iSCSI or AoE in your case, or even FCoE in the future (FCoE = Fiber Channel over Ethernet) is very possible. I’m trying to tell you that it’s possible to do your backups on Gigabit and/or 10Gb as long as you’ve designed a network that’s able to handle the kind of performance you are looking for.

When you don’t have “real-time” requirements, your most mercy needs to lie in what’s available to be used for bandwidth. At this point, it’s not about how “fast” the data can pass, it’s about how much you can move in a single transfer and do you have the needed disk space etc. The reality is, you still want to create a network that is fast, but can also handle a large amount of information being passed along the wire.

What you’re asking to do is not unreasonable.

You would be benefiting all of us if you layed out a design of your entire network as a whole, and HOW much data you want to back up and over what period of time you’d like it done.

If what you want in a solution can be proven, and accomplished, would you say that the solution has worked, and would you buy it?

Thanks,

Matt G.

[Matt Geier]

Devon,

I’ll reply to you here because I can give you some helpful information.
In a dual 2.5 G5, you should be fine with a Dual Port Gige as well as the one internal port. The rule is that it takes about 1Ghz to power 1 x 1Gb port. This means that if you have 3 Gigabit ports, the server would need to allocate 3Ghz of processing power to fully run those ports (100MB/sec) –

Also, you need to be clear on your memory in the server. If you are going to implement the server as a video editing server for Final Cut, you’ll want to use 1Gb (2Gb if your planning for ProRes) of memory for every 1 Client connected to the server. This will ensure FCP has enough buffering overhead to keep up with the users.

Depending on how many clients you have, which you didnt’ mention and is also equally important, you may or may not have sucess with your xraid.

XRAIDs are slow. Even Apple will tell you not to edit video from them. They have low bandwidth, and their disk latency is very high (making it very difficult to move data fast). This may not affect you in a DV environment like it would a ProRes environment. The requirements vary, and your only true way of testing this for yourself, is to get it hooked up and bang on it.

My two cent’s for now ….

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1

[Matt Geier]

Odd,

I’ve had a lot of people talk to me about HD editing on Ethernet. Here’s the bottom line.

Before I start getting you wrapped up in details about the solutions that you’ve looked at for HD Video Editing, I have to explain that there IS NO ETHERNET BASED SOLUTION FOR A MAC TO BE ABLE TO EDIT NATIVE HD UNCOMPRESSED. You will also be hard pressed to find anything that doesn’t cost 40-60K to do this as true Uncompressed HD.

I will tell you that you’ll probably hear and see stuff about Small Tree’s solutions that are are Ethernet based networks that run fast and allow you to edit video on the Ethernet wire direct from your storage. Even Small Tree solutions do NOT EDIT HD UNCOMPRESSED.
Even with 10Gb links running on an Apple client, you cannot push out the bandwidth needed for Uncompressed HD formats, not yet anyway. They are getting there.

To resolve this problem in short, most of the people I talk to looking at HD editing and want to do this on Ethernet decide to use Pro Res 422 and/or Pro Res HQ. Those are very good lossless HD compressions native to FCP and we hear good things about them. I can also say from a Small Tree perspective, that the solutions they offer are to support Pro Res environments under “realtime” conditions and this is where they start their testing. In order for you to NOT DROP FRAMES, you have to be able to MOVE THAT DATA FAST. (its not just about bandwidth now …)

Before you can proceed with a ANY Ethernet Based solution, you have to decide if you can edit in a compressed HD format like Pro Res. If the answer is yes to that then I’m positive you can find a solution. If you do this on your own, you will likely fail. You need to get a solution that is designed to perform under the “realtime” conditions that you need.

I would encourage you to call and discuss your configuration over the phone with someone who is familiar with Video Editing over Ethernet Solutions, and who have solutions designed for this work.

I hope this helps you.

Regards,

Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1