Matt Geier
Forum Replies Created
-
Steve,
I read Bob’s response to this and I wanted to address the part he could not.
You Write –
If I am only connecting 3 machines to the server, do I really need to combine the 4 port Ethernet card outputs to a managed Ethernet switch? Is there any problem in just connecting each machine to a port and giving each the 1Ghz bandwidth, and connecting using AFP?Reply –
You can skin the cat many ways and some of this depends on your own plans to grow the network. If you don’t have any growth to plan on, you can use just a Small Tree nic in your server, and directly connect your clients as Jumbo Frames to the network adapter.If you have plans to add additional servers with more storage, or additional editing clients beyond what you are set up for, you’ll need a the switch to do add editors. Otherwise you can only grow the network to whatever port count you have direct at the server.
**** I’d also like to point out that your edit clients would connect via Gigabit which will be able to give them 90MB of bandwidth over their wire. – I’m mentioning this because you stated 1Ghz, which is Gigahertz and is a processor speed, not Gigabit Ethernet.
You Write –
At a push CAN the server mac pro be used for viewing/ ingesting or does it HAVE to be left alone?Reply –
You SHOULD be leaving the server alone. This is also NOT recommended as Bob stated. In a smaller environment, this won’t be as big of concern as it would be in a larger environment, granted, mostly because of the communication going on inside your office amongst yourselves. However, in order for the solution to “always work optimally” you would NOT use the server for anything other then serving.The reality is you want the server doing what it was configured and designed to do – serve – if your network needs designed to do more then that, it should be implemented as such. The server is there to manage the connections of clients, switch and the storage reads/writes.
Often time’s if you have this plan in your head, you’d be in a position to use direct attach storage on one of your editing clients and ingest at those, then afp move the files to the centralized storage. (You can move this data up to 90MB/sec using Gigabit Jumbo Frames and up to 130MB or faster using a 10Gb connection)
An alternative to the suggestion above, is to invest in a Mac Pro to be used as an ingest station, hook it into the network with 10gb or 1gb using Jumbo Frames, and ingest directly to the Centralize Storage, making it available to the clients that have access to the storage.
Does this help you clear your questions up?
Regards,
Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1 -
Fernando,
You Write –
ok Megabits per second (mbps) are generally used to describe the speed of an Internet connection, whereas megabytes (MB) usually refer to the size of a file or storage space.but how can you say that DVCPro Hd (which is 100Mbits/sec) requires 13.9 MBytes/sec to travel on a network ?
Reply –
Both Megabits and Megabytes can be used to describe the speed of a connection since they convert one to another with the math.DVCPRO HD 1080i50 is a 108Mbit stream size OR ALSO the same as saying 13.5MB stream size.
in terms of a Gigabit Ethernet wire –
The wire itself is able to run at 800mbits/sec or the same as saying 100MB per second. This is the theoretical capacity of a Gigabit Ethernet wire.When you are on an Apple, using AFP, you’re wire runs about 90MB/sec at full blast if you are using Jumbo Frames. (And assuming you are passing that much MB/sec)
Hopefully this helps.
Regards,
Matt G
-
Raymond,
I can give you some input here that you can use.
If you are networking the two workstations together with Fibre Channel, you can do that of course. You’ll be spending about 1.5 – 2x the cost of what it would cost you to do this with Ethernet though.
For what you are talking about doing, even with two clients, this is close 20K price point for all the FC hardware and SAN Software License you would need. You are missing the pieces like a SAN Software License to manage storage, Fiber Channel Switch to manage connections, and MetaData Servers and all the extra redundancy you need on the network which is Required for Fibre Channel in case something breaks. Oh, and you’ll need to hire someone or have someone to call on to manage the network, unless you are XSAN certified. If you are looking for a “good cost” as you put it, FC will NOT be ideal!
If you think you cannot edit HDV on Ethernet, why?
You can complete Video Editing with Final Cut over Ethernet and this does occur in “real time” as long as your storage is fast enough and the rest of the pieces are in place for you to do it properly. There’s more then plenty of bandwidth on a Gigabit wire for what you’ve said in your post.
There is also the question of purchasing a Server (Mac Pro or XServe). If you don’t have a server (or sometimes Software) to manage the client connectivity from the switch to the server, or the direct connections to the server, you run a risk of corrupting each other’s work on the storage. The server plays traffic cop, it will make sure it’s the only one reading and writing to the storage. Each user would log into the server, and use the storage that’s attached to it to complete their tasks. This removes the idea of local attached storage at each workstation for any editing that is NOT HD Uncompressed.
The XRAID can move at about 160MB of total bandwidth. For DV and HDV, this would be enough bandwidth to support two users, however, I believe the latency of the disks are really poor, which could lead to dropped frames. Apple certainly does not recommend or suggest using these as Video Editing RAIDS.
What you need to make what you are trying to do work is the following
Another Apple to be your server, Mac Pro or XServe
a Small Tree NIC (PEG4 or PEG6) for your Server
Some other storage, recommended from Small Tree is an ST-RAID. They were designed and are certified to support multiple Pro Res HQ streams over an Ethernet based network utilizing Shared Storage. There are 8, 12, and 16TB configs available.I hope this helps a little.
I’m sure someone else will give their two cents also.
Regards,
Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1 -
et all,
For sake of clarity here because there’s a lot of Mb and MB being thrown around. For those that know this already we don’t tend to worry about because we generally know what “is implied” when it’s not stated correctly.
Without further rif raf…
Mb = Megabits
MB = Megabytes1Mb (Megabit) = 0.125 MB (MegaBytes)
1MB (Megabyte) = 8Mb (Megabit)If you have a 30Mb (Megabit) then you could also say you needed 3.7 MB (Megabyte) of bandwidth.
Matt G.
-
Greg,
Binding a couple of ports and designating those ports to one or two users is a set up is common in Pro Res environments with the solutions Bob and I are talking about. You would do this because you want dedicated links and bandwidth to the server.
The reality is that Ethernet can be configured a multitude of ways certainly which is ultimately what makes it inexpensive, flexible, scalable, and a very robust solution base.
Matt G.
-
Greg,
Arista is familiar to me, and to Small Tree. It’s one of the vendors that has a 10Gb Cat6 Switch.
Brocade also has one and right now I cannot find the link, but I know one exists.
Most of the reason why we are finding 10Gb CAT6 viable yet, has to do with the heat that the phy’s generate, causing boards to have large heat sinks. That’s clearly a problem with a congested footprint space like a switch.
As these types of problems are engineered and reworked in the industry, you’ll start to see these become more commodity.
There are a lot of places already wired to run CAT6, and 10gb would be a matter of plugging in a cable 🙂
-
Ben,
I’ll take some time and give you a reply that will help you here.
– An independent Mac Pro to act as server. Entry-level model. Will only serve video, nothing else.
* 1Ghz of Processor to every 1 Gigabit port. If you follow this rule, you will be able to power your gigabit ports at full speed. If you don’t have enough processor power, it’s hard to say if ALL the ports will run full speed or not.
* 1Gb of Memory for every 1 Editor. If you are planning on 15 editors, you want 16Gb of Memory. If you follow this rule, you will have enough memory in the server for Final Cut Buffering.
(If you had Pro Res requirments, I would have said 2GB for every 1 Editor)
– Shared across network via AFP
* Yes
– Mac Pro Apple Hardware RAID card with 4x Apple SATA 1TB drives set up in RAID-0 (Backup done externally)
* When this is the idea, it’s hard to say if it will work 100% under all conditions.
If you look at this strictly from a disk bandwidth perspective, the bandwidth should look okay. Where people in video editing should also be concerned, is how fast the information get’s to and from the disks. This is called latency. It’s very hard to know if this is a good set up for low latency. If had to place a guess, this would NOT perform under low latency requirements like what Pro Res HQ requires.
It’s likely at some point you could break this with DV work too, you’d just need to throw enough at it to decide what that breaking point is.
As you said, you tested this with 5 streams of DV.
Keep going to find out what the breaking point is, and be sure to try various video formats because each one runs a little differently on the wire.
The more users hitting the RAID, or any Storage, will decrease the performance over time with the more you stack onto it.
– Small Tree 4 port network card with jumbo frames set up on both clients and server, all plugged into switch with link aggregation set up
* Small Tree’s 4 Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will have 400MB/sec of bandwidth with all four ports aggregated.* Small Tree’s 6 Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will have 600MB/sec of bandwidth with all four ports aggregated.
– Entrasys 1Gb/sec Managed switches which support jumbo frames and link aggregation (I insisted on a Small Tree one, but education will only use Entrasys models because of an agreement they have with local suppliers, argh)
* If you are using something that’s not recommended, be sure it can support your requirements before approving the install.
* The switch should have 0.75 MB of Packet Buffer Memory Per Port – this is very important for Video Editing.
* The switch should support Dynamic Link Aggregation. This generally is a configurable item on Managed Switches. Typically Static is the default. Currently under 10.5 Apple ONLY supports Dynamic Link Aggregation. This falls under the 802.3ad specification, however, you need to check with the manual or the vendor to find out exactly how the switch you has supports it.
* The switch must support Full Duplex Full Control must also be able to work correctly. This would be Flow Control forward and backward (end to end).
Now i’m not even beginning to think that this would handle 100 machines, not even close. I’d very much hope it could handle up to 15 simultaneously (working on different projects). On paper this should be possible should it not, as DV-PAL is around 30mbit/sec, but obviously there are latency issues and other bottlenecks which i’m sure could cause slowdown.
Even if you did want 100 people all working at once. You would NEVER put them all on this ONE CONFIGURATION. You would at least use two servers and two raids and network them together. Go back up to my comment about putting a lot of users on RAIDs. The more you have, the less performance you get from your RAID.
I hope this doesn’t seem like a stupid setup, but based on what i’ve written above, could i get an estimate on how many simultaneous streams/clients this setup could handle? I’ve tested 5 simultaneous clients on our current setup which is a 100mbit network and an XServe and there appears to be no problem at the moment.
If you rely on just bandwidth math to accomplish what you want, you could use the following as a basis.A gigabit wire is specified to run at 100MB/sec, however, under Apple’s AFP, we can use Jumbo Frames and Reach a wire bandwidth of about 80MB/sec (Allowing 20% overhead for other i/o’s etc..)
80MB (One Gigabit Wire) Divided By 3MB (DV25) = 26 Streams of DV25
80MB (One Gigabit Wire) Divided By 7MB (DV50) = 11 Streams of DV504 Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will have 400MB/sec
Use 320MB because you minus 20% from 400MB320MB (Four Gigabit Wires) Divided By 3MB (DV25) = 106 Streams of DV25
320MB (Four Gigabit Wires) Divided By 7MB (DV50) = 45 Streams of DV506 Port Gigabit Ethernet Adapter will have 600MB/sec
Use 480MB because you minus 20% from 600MB480MB (Six Gigabit Wires) Divided By 3MB (DV25) = 160 Streams of DV25
480MB (Six Gigabit Wires) Divided By 7MB (DV50) = 68 Streams of DV50WORD OF WARNING – I would NEVER Recommend or Suggest ever putting this many users on one Server or one Raid due to the performance issues that can cause various hiccups.
It would always be best to split the users evenly across servers and raids to perform at “best/optimized” conditions.
I hope this helps you,
Matt G
651-209-6509 x 1 -
Hi Greg,
I participate here with Bob to help assist with questions like yours. Bob knows us Small Tree people well. He can vouch! 🙂
Question:
Do you just use one GigE port from the Switch to each Mac Pro Workstation? If so is it dedicated? (in other words use the Mac Pro’s other GigE port to go to the switch you use for other network activity, email, etc…) Or do you just run everything through the one switch?
Answer:
The reality is you can do it both ways. Because Managed Switches are very capable and build specifically for managing a lot of data and traffic, one switch will suffice because you can keep the traffic separate (video editing / administrative, email, dns, etc .. ). You can look at Small Tree’s ES4524D Managed Gigabit Ethernet Switch! The best switch for price/performance on the market!Question:
I have a 4 Core Xserve acting as a file server right now (3 drive raid 5 with the built in apple raid card). Can I use the Raid card instead of the ATTO R380? If not I’m guessing I can put the R380 in the XServe and the PEG6 in the two open PCI X8 slots..(it’s the previous gen. XServe so 2 x8 PCIe slots…not x16)Answer:
You run a risk here if you make the choice to do this.
The RAID cards and storage that people spec are typically done to the specifications that are required for passing files back and forth, NOT REAL TIME PERFORMANCE. Many of them go fast (Bandwidth). However the fastest ones tend to have the worst realtime characteristics and even 2 or even 3 streams of low bandwidth video tip them over (latency).Question:
Lastly….let’s say an affordable 10Gig Switch comes out in two years (fantasy..I know) can I just drop in a 10GB PEG 6, 10GIG cards in the Macs and the new switch and be in business? I always thought I would wait until 10GigE was available (and that it would be available in 2009…..looks like somebody put the brakes on it…) – but I’m sick of waiting.Answer:
10GbE CAT6 Cards are out and available for Windows and Linux and for Mac (Small Tree) Part Number = PETG1-C SRP = $1301.00. All of the current cards are Single Port units. I speculate as 10Gb CAT6 moves along, multi port units will become available.The real issue here is waiting on switch vendors to release CAT6 10Gb switches. There’s a few vendors out there working on some now. Those of us watching this expect to see 10Gb CAT6 really starting to surface closer to the end of Q4 in 2009.
Some comments about Pro Res HQ;
It is possible to edit Pro Res HQ over Gigabit Ethernet in Real Time. You can fit comfortably two streams of Pro Res HQ on a single Gigabit wire (approx 60MB of Pro Res HQ data). If you are not able to do this today, there could be several reasons why.It’s best to find a solution that will do this for you and that has been engineered to do this kind of work.
Matt G
Small Tree
651-209-6509 x 1 -
Stefan,
I’ve read through the thread.
When someone yells at Bob, I’m always inclined to chime in. 🙂
In Bob’s defense though, he has to start grinding the axe right away because if he doesn’t people think this is trivial, and it’s not. What will happen is someone else (with even less knowledge then yourself perhaps) will come across this forum or another one and start thinking they have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they don’t. That’s all he’s getting at. Plus, time and time again, people show up expecting all the answers when they should be talking to experts expecting to work with a budget. 🙂 – It’s nothing personal I’m sure…
Onward to your problem … (I’m from Small Tree – Most here on the SAN Forum see my name and know who I am)
A Mac network can move files to and from AFP, and NFS.
iSCSI is not ready for Video Editing in Real Time. There’s just too much latency with iSCSI protocol to successfully edit under real time conditions. I/O’s cannot be moved fast enough.
In addition to what you’ve layed out here, there are some other things that need to be figured into the grand scheme. I’d like to talk to you to understand what some of those other requirements are. In addition, I’d like to know the exact Omneon model you have.
Give me a call when you can.
651-209-6509 x 1
(Small Tree)Matt G.
-
Brian,
When disks reach a point of 80% full, the room for failure and disk fragmentation become greatly increased. This could be some of what you are experiencing. If your data has been badly fragmented, that means it’s going to reside in all different areas of the disk, which will in turn reduce how fast the information is getting back and forth, as a result, dropping frames. (that’s one theory…)
I have to assume that you are editing with the same formats you have used previously on the disk you have now.
One could hope that cleaning your drive and making it less then 80% full, would improve your performance. If that doesn’t work, I’d evaluate other things and find out why those dropped frames might be occurring otherwise. (It could be several things … but like i said, i assume you’re not trying anything different then you did before.)
Regards,
Matt G