Nathaniel Cooper
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Chad,
Where I am a manufacture and I think your question is geared towards other users… it would be helpful if you clarified what you’re trying to do with a MAM. Are you looking for both online & offline searching of assets? What type of metadata requirements (if any do you have)? Do you need to have proxy previews? Is this internal for your team only or are you trying to have client based access? Does it matter if users can connect from outside the office? Do you care about any editing/timecode notation functions? Can you describe the storage system(s) that this will be managing? Is there any LTO or Cloud backup/archive integration required?
Sorry for the list of questions, but I think it will help get some info going defining what you’re trying to set up.
Good Luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems -
Hi James,
Thanks for posting. From what I can tell your biggest concern is performance. From what you mentioned above maintaining that level of performance will be no problem, you can easily swap our your SATAboy with pretty much any new Fibre Channel RAID and you’ll be there. If you want to increase performance on your existing set up (per user) you would need to upgrade all components to 8Gb or 16Gb FC.
As far as upgrading existing vs going a new route. Ultimately, I’d recommend digging into the details of each of the solutions you mentioned to see what they would offer your workflow vs what you have now.
Both the SNS and Tigerbox will offer great performance and add a management layer to your system, which as I’m sure you know, is huge.
The ProMAX side will do that, but it will also integrate the LTO into your workflow fully, so when you search for media it doesn’t matter if it’s online, on backup storage or on LTO archive; you can search and find your media from a single interface. Essentially replacing both the shared storage and Bru, and combining them into one piece of software. It also adds some additional features like AE rendering and transcoding.
As stated, any of these options should be 100% fine for your performance requirements. Upgrading just the storage is your easiest short term option and requires virtually no change, which is nice. Moving to an all new solution will give you a ton of new functions, but will probably take more adjustments to the exact way you’re working right now.
If you have any questions specific on the ProMAX or want to dig into a demo let me know.
Best Regards,
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
I found your question “Why is pricing all over the map?” really interesting and understand why it seems odd, here’s my experience for what it’s worth.
Shared storage fast enough to edit video is now a commodity. It is recent that it has become a commodity – it used to be unique value position to create shared storage for video. This means, more low cost options flood the market, which drives price down. The price of simple shared storage is not much at all, maybe 20% higher than what you can build it for yourself. Many products on the market are not much more than DIY (Do it yourself) and/or not much more capable than a DIY solution.
I think there are two major factors to really look at that allow a manufacture to charge more 1) The breadth and depth of features beyond shared storage 2) How integrated those features are with each other and the storage.
As an example, you specifically mention LTO. You could save money by buying commodity shared storage and setting it up with a low cost LTO system. But the end result could be clunky and difficult to use. It took (not exaggerating) 2 years of development to fully integrate LTO backup and archive into the ProMAX properly. That wasn’t easy to do and it drove up both the depth of features, the interaction between those features and the value companies receive from it. That example made our product less of a commodity, which maintains a higher price point than something that has less depth and integration.
Hope that helps.
Nathaniel Cooper
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hi Kevin,
I think you’ve been working with Shawn, but I wanted to chime in on this. I’m a bit biased, as I do work for ProMAX, but most everyone that responds on here biased ?
If LTO is a requirement then ProMAX, Editshare and Quantum are the only companies that make both shared storage and LTO archive. All the other options you mentioned are good products, but LTO archive means bringing in another product (and yes another support contract) and if they are separate products, then any integration between shared storage and archive is usually non-existent or, at very best, limited . That’s the whole reason we built Platform, to put that all in a single interface.
If you’d like to hit up me or Shawn offline I can connect you with customers that have gone from separate shared storage and archive systems, to a Platform with the LTO built in. The experience is night and day, it’s really improved user adoption of proper backup and archive functions. Best systems in the world don’t work if they don’t get used. That’s why making it simple and integrated is critical (IMO).
Not sure when the last time you looked it was, but here is a 12 min video refresher on the integration and software.
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
Super helpful. So you’re TIFF image sequences are pushing about 200MB/s, so if you have 3 workstations going, call it 600MB/s. It’s decently heavy performance, but nothing too difficult for any half way decent solution.
There is no such thing as a thunderbolt drive that you can just plug 3 workstations into and share, you need a NAS/SAN file system to have multiple users share.
Simply announced an all thunderbolt based san with users connecting over TB, and using Xsan (stornext) on top to be the SAN management layer. That said, you’d still need to have a (completely separate) metadata network since it uses Xsan and IMO their solution adds an insane amount of complexity and limitations, but they are trying to go after a part of the market that doesn’t want complexity and limitations.
NAS-wise, if you really enjoy messing with stuff, you can DIY your way into a home built NAS that should be able to keep up with 200MB/s. Focus on 10GbE connections and SSDs. Between you and me, use Promise SANlinks, not Atto. ATTO is the best of the best for Fibre Channel, but their 10GbE drivers are not great. Honestly this will be a lot of extra time and effort and you will get random facebook messages from Bob Zellin yelling at you “you’re doing it wrong!!!”. This is a good option if you ENJOY the struggles and triumphs of DIY.
One step up from that, which will work is a QNAP/Synology server. Solid products, low cost and good performance. They won’t cost you much more than a DIY.
If you want to go beyond that you get into the fully managed solutions. Mine is ProMAX Platform and our whole deal is that we integrate Shared Storage + MAM + Backup/Archive into a single system. Cost wise it’s a step up from a QNAP, but it is feature wise as well, so you just have to figure out what is best for your business now and over the next while.
Hope this was helpful. Feel free to hit me up if you have any other questions.
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hey Travis,
Little late to the party on this one, but I think I can chime in on a few things that have not been said… To everything said, so far in this thread, yes, I totally agree with all.
If you need fast storage, and nothing more. Then you have mentioned two good options. QNAP is newer and just on the cusp of playing in the professional world, but I know a few people that have used it with success in professional editorial applications, it’s not feature rich, but for sharing some HD files, it can be a great lower cost option. Facilis has been in that game a lot longer and will be able to offer higher performance, but you’ll spend a good bit more and in my opinion, they have really not done much development at all to their product in the last 5 years, they are still running their systems on a Windows 7 OS, which to me is absolutely nuts and is a sign of not committing to moving your product forward.
That said, I am a firm believer in the fact that nearly every user I’ve been part of deploying shared storage with (well over 1000 sites over the last 15 years) needs 3 core things. 1) Shared Storage 2) Asset Management and 3) Backup/Archive capabilities.
There are a lot of reasons for needing all 3 technology functions. This is the reason I work at and push ProMAX Platform, as our whole existence is based on building all 3 core technologies into a single product. Regardless, I would recommend digging a little deeper into the various products on the market, almost all of the vendors that are in the facilis price range (SNS, Editshare, ProMAX) offer some of those required features beyond shared storage, which in my experience you will need.
Good luck and hit me up if you have any questions.
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hi Matt,
I may be misunderstanding your question… when you ask ” Is there a solution whereby we can access a storage unit (SSD Raid or some type of Array) locally via USB 3.0 or thunderbolt?” That seems like you’re looking for local storage, which there are a ton of great options out there. G-Tech and Lacie probably being the most popular.
Are you wanting it to be local for editing, then shared for something else? Also, as far as the 2K footage goes, that can really range all over the map as far as bandwidth requirements. What codecs/formats are the 2K files your shooting?
Let me know and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Best Regards,
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
It’s a matter of access to the storage, both the NAS you add and your existing Thunderbolt storage need to be able to see each other if you want to backup between them.
You could do this at your ‘creative’ workstation, but I would not personally want to use the same workstation for both backing up and working, as it will likely slow your primary tasks down. This is why you would (generally) want a dedicated workstation to do this (like an iMac). The AFP reshare, in this case would be so that your primary workstation can access the Thudnerbolt RAID that is directly connected.
I would recommend checking out https://bombich.com/ they make Carbon Copy Cloner, which should have some great features in the budget you want to stay within.
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hey Randall,
There are two ways that I know of to integrate all of these together.
To get all of your DAS Thunderbolt storage seen directly by a NAS, you can get a Mac Mini and reshare it as AFP storage, then as you described, use a 3rd party NAS to NAS backup utility between the two. In my opinion, there is a whole lot of networking and complexity there, especially considering you don’t need multi-user access.
The other option is something in the ProMAX Platform line up. All ProMAX servers have built in Thunderbolt for the exact reason you are talking about. There is also built in backup and archive software, so it would be a single unit to learn/support.
I don’t know of any other vendors doing this, but it is a very common use of both Mac Mini’s and ProMAX Platforms.
If you want to dig into the ProMAX side of things, hit me up.
Best,
Nathaniel Cooper
nathaniel@promax.com -
Hey Ryan, good to know you guys are focusing on the NAS side now, that’s awesome! My understanding was that SANmp is recommended for media files and the NAS partition is used for project files. Are you guys not recommending SANmp anymore? What are there workflows that SNS recommends SANmp for, if any?
As far as transcoding goes, I didn’t see anything on the SNS website on this. Is it transcoding for proxies or for editorial/delivery? Is there a list of format support that you link the community to the info on this?
Just so I’m giving some info out as well… Platform supports transcoding for low res proxies as well as editorial/delivery. Supporting most formats like MOV wrapped DNxHR, ProRes, XD CAM, AVC Intra, H.264; MXF wrapped XDCAM, XAVC, DNxHD; and R3d etc. etc. to a variety of codecs including DNxHR and ProRes. We also have native Red to ProRes & DNxHD transcoding. It’s touched on briefly in the video at 11:04 if you want to check out some of how our interface handles it.
As far as customers using transcoding, this is from the NBA’s Pelicans, who transcode on their Platform from P2 to ProRes https://promax.com/cust_succ/platform-connects-superdome-workflows-for-nbas-new-orleans-pelicans/
As I haven’t read the SNS case studies in a while, if you have any user case studies for transcoding feel free to share those with the community.
You guys have a great product and I still hold a lot of fondness for EVO, glad to see you guys pushing it forward, we all need to innovate!
N