Nathaniel Cooper
Forum Replies Created
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Yes, having local access will give you more performance than remote. If the IT team is setting up a VPN, I’d say let them go for it, there’s not a reason not to. For opening and working on an AE project, it will depend on what is in the project/how big it is/connection speed at home & the office.
Smaller AE projects will buffer in RAM and could be seamless, but that is for very basic stuff. Likely anything they are working on would need to be copied, then worked from locally. I’d have them set up the VPN then try.
ProMAX customers are all facing the same challenge. We put together a Remote Video Editing Workflows: Your Options blog. Given this is written for ProMAX customers/products, however most of the advice applies to most scenarios. I’d very much recommend the 40 min webinar reply at the bottom. Our VP of engineering really broke down a TON of good info for anyone that needs to understand some of the upsides and downsides of remote options.
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
nathaniel@promax.com -
It’s far from conclusive, but the Aquantia NICs are what concern me. We (ProMAX) have had a ton of trouble with those. It’s the same hardware chip that Bob mentioned in the Sonnet Solo and not to expect beyond 400MB/s. We have seen WILD swings in performance on the Aquantia NICs (like 500MB/s on NIC “A” and 150MB/s on NIC “B” with all other factors the same).
We’ve had great experience on the windows side with Chelsio NICs, you may want to try ordering 1 as a comparison.
I’d also escalate your case with EditShare. They are a solid product with a solid team, but I’m pretty sure if you tell them you’re getting help from Bob Z & ProMAX on creative cow, you’ll get their top guy/gal ????
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems -
Hey Don,
The existence of 1G on your network will not negotiate 10G connections down. It is possible if you’ve created 2 separate ethernet paths to the storage, that your workstation will choose the slower path.
Your switch model is helpful, but what are the 10G NICs you’re using on the workstation side, and what is the storage & drives? Also, when you say ‘less-than-anticipated’ is that more like 50MB/s or 500MB/s?
If you’re concerned that you’re running at 1G on those connects, you can run the Blackmagic Disk Speed test, if you’re getting over 150MB/s you’re connecting over 10G. Unfortunately I have seen a lot of inconsistent performance from lower end 10G NICs (including the NICs on iMac Pros). To really push in the 800MB/s range on 10G I’ve only seen that consistently on higher end external NICs.
As example sonnet has a bus powered TB to 10G for $200, but they also sell a higher end TB to 10G in the $600 range. We have seen much better results with the higher end NICs.
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems -
I’ve spoken to clients very happy with these, I’ve also replaced a few.
Performance-wise, depending on what drives you put in, you’ll get what you need. Thunderbolt connectivity is cool, but a bit of a ‘non-intended’ use for the protocol. Nice part, you don’t need 10G adapters. Be aware, if you’re workstations are more than a few feet from the server, you’ll need specialty fiber optic thunderbolt cables, which are oddly expensive.
If you get these, hire Bob Z to set it up. It’s that simple.
Downside is scalability (this is almost always why customers have switched to our solution from a QNAP), this is scaling both # of users and # of TBs. If you don’t plan on going past 4 users and maybe 200ish TB, that shouldn’t matter.
Video focused features/support is the other big thing to be aware of. Professional video teams are a side market for QNAP. They have a couple of support guys in the US and are good for IT type support/making sure their unit is working as they have designed it, which absolutely can be used for video editing, but is not designed for it. Don’t expect anyone from QNAP to help if frames are dropping in Pr, or know why media isn’t re-connecting how it should.
We (ProMAX) have a very slightly more expensive option, MediaHub. With 4 SSD slots & 12 HDD slots, it runs $4500. We only connect users over 1G or 10G, not over thunderbolt, so if that is required it won’t work; but it is a video design product with things like MAM & Proxy indexing built in. If you want to try one out we do offer a Test Drive program to try it out at no risk.
Either way, you likely won’t go wrong. Good luck!
Nathaniel @ ProMAX
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Sustained video performance if you do 4 x SSDs is about 1000MB/s. That’s about 14 streams of ProRes 4K @ 560MB/s. It should be no issue, but, what data rate are your specific files at?
Yeah, the 8 bay array is external to the MediaHub, we partner with M-Logic for the external thunderbolt arrays. I think they have a sale on them right now for $500 off. So if you order from them you’ll save some $.
https://www.mlogic.com/products/mspeed-8If you want to see a set up one of our tech guys did this video for our test systems https://support.promax.com/knowledge/how-to-media-hub
We can do up to 4 x SSDs internal on the MediaHub, then the 8/12 bay external gives you a ton more capacity.
For LTO, we also work with M-Logic, https://www.mlogic.com/products/mtape-thunderbolt-lto-8 this little guy has been pretty solid for us.
Hope that helps!
N
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Those are both good units, in pretty much any case just make sure the server has a 10G connection and you have a 10G switch to go to the workstations. Almost everyone uses the lower cost Netgear 10G switches. They are amazing bang for the buck.
The 10G NICs on the iMac Pros are not as good as external, don’t expect to see over 400MB/s on those, likely closer to 300. For what you’re describing with your workflow, that should be fine.
Don’t over spend on the SSD’s, here is a blog I did on Do Enterprise SSDs Matter? please ignore that I forgot to button my 2nd button in the video. 😐
Lastly, if you’re going to be doing LTO or Cloud, check out the MediaHub with 10G and 12 Slots, you’re looking at $3,894, which includes MAM & if you add LTO/cloud it’s immediately integrated.
QNAP has good products, but if you want to add archival you’re now integrating multiple products/vendors. We also offer more in depth video support and features, as video teams are 100% of our focus.
If you’re interested, we have a small fleet of test units you can sign up here and we will actual send you a MediaHub to try out.
Either way, good luck in your set up!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX -
Sure thing, also, check out Which NAS is best for your video team? if you want to see a comparison of ProMAX vs QNAP.
For starting out in shared storage MediaHub is a great option.
Good luck with wherever you land!
N
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Zach – In response to a great question:
“We’ve been in contact with SNS and Luma Forage trying to grasp what we should do. We’re lost at sea. I just can’t grasp ONE thing; why is SNS EVO 8-Bay and Luma Forge Jellyfish 7-8 TIMES the cost of a Synology setup?? I can’t seem to get a straight answer from anyone.”
Here is why…
From 2000-2008ish it was legitimately difficult to make shared storage for video teams work. I cannot tell you the amount of hours I spent checking firmware and jumpers on individual drives back then… hundreds if not thousands. Getting systems to work “well enough” was a huge deal & commanded a $50k price tag to anyone who wanted shared storage. Back then, there were very few competitors, maybe 6 of us.
From 2008ish-Now, other people/companies saw a technology space with an interesting niche & more vendors came along. More vendors + maturing technologies = Expand capabilities – or – Lower Prices. Without any notable exceptions, video vendors expanded product capabilities because no one wanted to lower the price. As an example, this is why most of the products on the market have a ‘MAM’ option.
Around 2010 system design shifted from SAN to NAS. If you want that geeky history lesson, I did a video blog on it here.
All the while NAS vendors Synology & QNAP both built companies focused on SMB/surveillance/home networks.
Around 2015, switches/NIC/Drives/internal components became faster and less expensive. These factors allowed QNAP & Synology to start getting the performance needed for smaller video teams. So people started buying those brands because for the 1st time there was an option that wasn’t super expensive (relatively speaking).
Both QNAP & Synology have 3 advantages that none of the video focused vendors have. 1) Economy of scale, both companies in the 250-500 headcount range, vs the 10-25 range of most of the video vendors. 2) Lower cost of employees, both are based in Taiwan. Not a bad thing, but employees in Taiwan are about 1/4th the cost of employees in the US, where most of the video vendors reside. 3) Professional video is an adjacent market, not their focus. This means, they can sell at much lower margins and it’s still a win for them.
Meanwhile, video vendors have not changed their pricing model because they sell enough in corporate/edu/gov’t where pricing is not the same factor as for a smaller agencies/groups. These markets will often pay 7-8x for better support / a few extra bells & whistles (especially when it’s your budget, not your money). Let’s be honest here though, big organizations are usually lagging adopters of what works for the smaller, agile, teams that are willing to try the new stuff to make things happen. When a product works, it tends to “fall up” into the bigger companies as reputation and word of mouth spreads. The big companies just want stuff that works, and they wait until the small business owners prove it so they don’t have to take the risk. We can and do play in that market, and it’s interesting and challenging in it’s own way, but it’s not where the real fun is.
The main reason that ProMAX exists in this industry (and have since the mid 90’s) because we love the technology side of the creative space. As it became apparent that the small/medium sized teams (where most of that really cool stuff happens) have moved to generic IT tools due to pricing, we knew we needed to change.
At first we were a little bummed to admit to ourselves that the we’d gotten complacent and the market responsible for our success for the last 20+ years had begun to move on without us…But, then we shook it off and looked at what we could do with the new technologies and pricing out there and said screw it, we like you guys and we can do better. So we decided to burn down the old pricing model and keep making cool stuff for the creative teams at prices that actually make sense, and with us, you can get a system tuned specifically for video performance, built and supported directly by a team who’ve actually worked in our industry for a few decades now. We think it’s a solid offer. You can learn more here.
Nathaniel @ ProMAX
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Steve, I know a lot of video pro’s have gone with QNAP/Synology because the “premium video vendors” don’t have fair pricing. We changed this at ProMAX a while back.
We also launched the ProMAX MediaHub starting at $1,495.
Here is the Max vs Sustained Performance blog I mention at the end of the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ozKDL_1i1g&feature=youtu.be
Nathaniel @ ProMAX
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QNAP makes a good server at a low cost. Like with many technology options, compare it to the market from 5 or 10 years ago and it’s twice the product at a forth of the cost.
That said, the question is a bit like saying ‘I want the best camera on the market, how is the Canon 5D?’ Is it a high quality professional camera? Yes. Would you pick it over shooting on a Red camera? Depends on the application, but if someone asks for the best camera, we’d probably all pick something other than a 5D.
If what you need is no frills network shares, then the QNAP is a good option that people have had success with. If you want the best, generally our market lands on Quantum, Avid, ProMAX, EditShare and SNS; all good products. One of our customers Blue Juice just did a really nice video recently on our stuff, you can see it here.
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper @ ProMAX Systems