[Matt Geier]

Hi Mark,

I’m going to be a nice guy and do something nobody else has right now on this forum posting….you mention using Pro Res LT. I’m making an assumption you’re not intending to do anything with Multi Video Threads per client, so I would just tell you that what you want to do is entirely OVERKILL and EXPENSIVE (Considering you want to save money) and to not use a switch at all and just go direct to the server using Gigabit from the client editor stations ………the real problem you’ll have is making sure whatever storage you use, and server tuning options, wire tuning options, and whatever else you want to invoke can will all work the way they should do the editing in real time you need to do when all 5, 6 etc people hit the storage network at once…….

I recommend calling Small Tree —– WHY? — No, it’s not because I’m working for them, it’s because they are Real Time Video Experts from SGI and Cray and they know what you’ll need to make your Shared Storage work right and they can solve ANY problem you’ll find yourself having with it in terms of video performance, o/s performance, shared network performance, etc.

Here’s a few additional perks because I’m a nice guy —-

Using 6 1xGB Ports (600MB/sec) Link Aggregated to your Switch, is about the same as what a Single 10Gb Ethernet link will run under AFP …… that’s just how it is …..

You’re better bet here would just be to stick a Small Tree, PE2G6i Card into a Mac Pro (making sure the Mac Pro is the best of all the systems connecting to it in terms of generation, ethernet chip controller, etc…) and connect Small Tree Single Port Cards (PEG1) to each editor station (or opt to use their built in versions….) and hook them directly to the server……

The rest will be up to you to resolve and take care of if you don’t want to put the money saved from NOT using 10Gb in this case and make the Storage and Support Services investment to KNOW 100% that what you get will work and can be supported by whomever is selling it to you directly.

Let me know if you’d like to talk. I’m sure with some Google searching you can find your way around. You may even want to swing on over to the Small Tree forum to find some contacts that would be happy to have a phone conversation with you!

https://forums.creativecow.net/smalltree

Regards,

Matt G (Small Tree)

[Matt Geier]

Hi Nigel,

Here at Small Tree we get this question a fair amount.
We’ve talked to Intel and Apple about it at various levels. Here’s our take;

I’ve heard from (name of company and source removed) that Thunderbolt is primarily a good replacement (for the time being) for Direct Attached eSATA and Firewire or USB devices.

Thunderbolt is very much like firewire. It’s going to be a local storage bus. It will also be more since it can support peripherals like a PCIE bus.

The key in this is to know that Thunderbolt will not replace networking. You will just see networking peripherals develop.

Ethernet is still going to be around for ages to come! There are two things we say here; In terms of networking, It’s either using Ethernet or it’s using an EtherNOT, and Thunderbolt is an “EtherNOT”

I hope this helps you a little.

Regards,

Matt Geier
Small Tree

[Matt Geier]

If you are truly using Quick Time — It’s my understanding that it will act “jerky” — In Final Cut if you were “Editing” in Real Time, those Jerks would be equivalent to likely dropped frames in the playback.

I also know you can adjust Final Cut to not drop frames if it were to occur… I’m not an FCP expert.

If you’re not concerned with the performance you see; great; keep going until you get concerned. We can all discuss it more then! 🙂

Just a couple of thoughts.

[Matt Geier]

Hi Jason,

In terms of Apple performance, NFS and Final Cut don’t really seem to work well together. A few things to point out;

NFS is a memory hog, it uses huge amounts of memory. This will be very detrimental to your Real Time playback. Here’s a thread off discussions.apple that may help understand this. From (2007) https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1214948

NFS works fine for some things in Final Cut but not everything that Final Cut needs for you to run properly in RT. There are some issues with file naming. FCP has trouble opening and saving files on NFS. It’s believed to be a resource fork issue. For example, FCP usually won’t let you select an NFS volume to use as scratch.

I see another thing that concerns me. You said you wanted to run 220MB/sec for Pro Res HQ. The problem with that is Gigabit will not allow you to go that fast. Gigabit on a Mac will allow you to run full blast at about 90-100MB/sec … HOWEVER, when using Pro Res in real time, you should expect it to be unstable / unreliable for anything beyond 2 streams at about 15 FPS (30MB/sec). Comfortably you should be able to fit two streams on the wire which would really be about 60MB/sec of bandwidth moving across…..

The AJA tool is not a good test application for real time performance of your RAID…it’s only going to tell you how fast the RAID is reading / writing in terms of MB/sec. You cannot and should not rely soley on that number, because it often has little bearing on actual capabilities of real time performance of your RAID / Network environment.

I hope this is helpful to you somewhat.

Thanks,

Matt G
Small Tree

[Matt Geier]

Rick,

The more and more I read this thread, it’s coming down to how cheap people can put something together and HOPE it works, and it’s all only based on Bandwidth of X parts … and nothing more.

A lot of people think when you tell them they need something “fast” they go out and buy the cheapest thing that goes 800MB/sec or more and thinks that will do them forever well.

It’s not true.

To do Video Editing, the real questions should be, whatever you decide to get is; How long do you expect it to last before you need more of it… who will you call when it fails and will they be able to help you do something other then replace the hardware; assuming it’s not defective…. or will you just keep throwing money at it hoping to fix the problem you’ve been plagued with…..

Take it from me as part of a team of people that specialized in deploying real time solutions for places like NASA and the likes of people that need 100% uptime; “Just because you move X hundreds of MB/sec of data, it doesn’t mean diddle for what you can do for real time performance of video…..”

In your case, If it’s not the Pro Res 422 15FPS that breaks it, it will be 422 HQ 15FPS, if it’s not that, it will be the 422 HQ 50FPS …. … Or will it?

This goes in saying, regardless of this being Shared Storage or Direct Attached Storage question post.

Make sure whatever you buy with the best confidence, is that your investment isn’t a money pit of sorts…..

[Matt Geier]

Hi all,

In the world of Video Editing and Real Time RAID performance, stripping tends to be very bad. It’s a lot of Large I/O’s that need to go back and forth quickly on the disk, and stripping in most cases adds a lot of overhead that tends to slow down the disk performance.

In the world of Databases, I could see RAID 10 as being okay. Just so long as the data gets to and from the raids and in one piece, all should be well…..

In a RAID 5 or RAID 6 environment, you can respectively loose 1 or 2 disks, and of course things are slow in terms of bandwidth performance, but usually you can still accomplish some method of real time performance, it’s just limited performance at that….. but it’s not “down or lost” —

Speaking in terms of Real Time video on Mac OS X of course keeping in mind all of this is a variant between vendors….

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

HI Rick,

That’s a fair reply.

I’d like to mention that a lot of times what you spend $$ for Direct Attached, those dollars would also be well used in a Shared Ethernet environments. (giving you the need not to pass drives back and forth.) — Taking drives in and out a lot of times, lessens there long term reliability because they are always spinning up and down…This is why you leave Shared RAIDS on all the time….or all week, and shut them down on the weekend.

The long term investment will outweigh the short term “i need something now” periods.

It’s not up to me where you spend you’re dollars. I just like to see people walk away from here as happy as possible for the money they put in.

Regardless of what you decide; it’s still critical to get something based on the real time performance of the video formats you require, and how many total you need to run, and what bandwidth is available to do so….

That said — I’ll leave you be.

Regards,

Matt G

[Matt Geier]

Hi Rick,

What’s your definition of a SAN? –

Sounds like your in a bad place right now and could use some insight to Ethernet based Shared Network solutions for Mac OS X.

Do you want to have Shared Storage that’s able to support those project files you speak of so that everyone can just have the same RAID to work off of? Is it being considered?

How many TB of Storage are you thinking?
How many Video Editing Suites do you need to support at one time?
What Video Formats are you running, and how many to each workstation?

Even if you’re not looking for Direct Attached (Because those will run differently then if they are shared on the network) – I can help you 100%.

Please contact me if you like. I’ve left my number at the bottom for you.

ALL of Small Tree’s Storage Products will come with RAID 5, we won’t allow anything less. RAID is not DATA Protection however, so you should also consider a BACKUP solution as well. RAID 5, 6 etc, will allow your RAID to lose a drive or two, but the data needs to be stored in a safe place too, just in case the RAIDs do crash.

If the time is here and now, get busy creating, or wait for things to keep going wrong! (I hope it’s not the latter)

Regards,

Matt Geier (Small Tree)
952-641-7433

[Matt Geier]

Yes — Sorry — Thanks for correcting me …

Mb = Megabits
MB = Mega Bytes

My references were to MB….. not Mb… apologies.

[Matt Geier]

Hi Vik,

I’ve been following the chat for a while.

Remember using the term Fibre can cause misleading references… Fibre which is most commonly referred to in a tradition SAN environment is Fibre Channel. Just because you have it, doesn’t mean it will always work in real time. — This is true of any solution — “Just because you have it, and it provides great throughput, doesn’t mean it will work in real time”

Small Tree offers Gigabit and 10Gb Ethernet solutions designed for Mac OS X. Ethernet can be run over Copper or Fiber — Ethernet connections. (Not Fibre Channel)

In a real time video editing environment, most people that come across the Ethernet solutions, can get by with Gigabit connections (reliably that can support 2 x Streams of Pro Res) —

Some choose 10Gb for 3 or more streams per timeline, and some prefer 10Gb for fast Pushing and Pulling files to and fro on the storage network.

Gigabit on a Mac – about 100 Mb/sec roughly of through put is available on the wire.
10Gb on a Mac – about 250+ Mb/sec roughly of through put is available on the wire.

This may seem low; however in a Real Time environment, Bandwidth is usually the easy part to get working properly. What you really want to look for is Disk Response times needed for each video thread, often referred to as “Latency” of your storage.

In a Shared Storage environment it all changes; which gives you an overall Network Latency Profile.
Latency is key in real time strategy, along with bandwidth, along with a Solution provider that understands video on a network, shared, and direct attached storage is an even better play.

Having been a bunch of SGI and Cray people at Small Tree, we get that, and know what it takes to get things working in all the right ways, and what to tweak or not tweak to get what you need for Bandwidth performance, and Latency performance required for editing video on the wire….shared or not.

I hope that helps.

Regards,

Matt Geier (Small Tree)
952-641-7433