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Ok a bit of a question/conundrum here. I work as an animator at company A, a production studio, who is owned by the same guy that owns company B, an advertising agency. We're sister companies and fairly small (20 employees each). I handle IT stuff here because it's fairly low key and "know computers" (we all know how that works out). The other guys, co B, just let their IT guy go and are currently using me as their support. Now they don't have any complicated setups so that's all fine and dandy. However we just landed a HUGE client so they are restructuring and want a better IT infrastructure. They aren't solely relying on me but they are valuing my opinion and I told them I'd check some things out for them. We have two huge issues. Storage and Backup (with offsite backup as well). Since this is the storage thread I'll just stick with that for now. Currently they have two frankenstein server solutions just sitting in a closet. They are basically just two computers with external 500 gig drives attached which people access over the network. 1 is current use stuff and the other is archive. I'm currently looking at solutions that may involve getting them a proper SAN so that stuff will be organized better and on 1 server. The basic needs are very simple. Just a drive that has all the asset files that everyone can access if they have proper permissions. All the terminology in this thread can be a bit overwhelming, but looking at a SAN or NAS is the correct solutions yes?
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Sep 29, 2008 17:38
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Catch 22 posted:I don't want to dwell on this to much but because you have never had a SAN and you are not %100 the "tech guy" I want to stress this so bad to you. Oh definitely that is what I'll be doing this week.
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Sep 29, 2008 17:46
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I guess I can ask this part of the question as well...what's a good pipeline for backing up from a SAN or NAS? They want server A to be current work. Server B to be archived work. All of that work backed up to tape for offsite storage and then also have physical backups in house (DVDs or whatever). They would also like a synced offsite server somewhere for fast restoration only.....they really won't pay for jack.  Or at least not the massive costs it would cost for that.
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Sep 29, 2008 17:51
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rage-saq posted:You need to hire a consultant to come in and help you understand what you want. You could be talking about something in the 40-50k range (unless you need new servers too) or you could be talking about something in the 300k+ range. A qualified consultant will help you figure out what you want vs what you want to pay for. Yeah we have one coming in next week. Like I said this is just me putting feelers out there to see what other folks use.
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Sep 29, 2008 18:07
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Catch 22 posted:rage-saq posted:Awesome thanks!
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Sep 29, 2008 21:33
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Vanilla posted:In this situation people ensure the storage is replicated between both sites. I meant "pipeline" as in "workflow." Not backing up over the internet.
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Sep 30, 2008 15:36
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Ok on a seperate note we are looking at a MacBookPro for field use with our RED One cameras. We need some serious external storage of course and are looking at things like Caldigit systems and various other RAID arrays. Any suggestions for portable, but sturdy RAID arrays (preferably eSATA) for use with in the field video editing? At the moment we probably just need around 2 TB. And holy poo poo that gets expensive.
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Sep 30, 2008 19:13
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Catch 22 posted:http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?DriveID=410 Thanks for the heads up. I guess I just meant something that is in a sturdy case. And yeah we're all PC/Avid here, but the RED's flow well with Macs (at least REDCine does...they have a rough Avid solution that just doesn't cut it at the moment though).
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Oct 2, 2008 02:08
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Being new to SAN type storage...what are options that don't require per license usage? One of our companies has a FC SAN that has Stornext or whatever and it's like 3500 per computer. Do Dell EqualLogic's that are iSCSI require licenses per user?
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Jun 9, 2009 21:51
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A good rack-mountable NAS with 4 to 8 TB and under 2 grand?
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Jun 22, 2009 17:34
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Sweet thanks for the recommends. Doesn't have to be ultra fast as it will only be used to pull graphic stills and not video.
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Jun 22, 2009 18:52
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What about Qnap? I haven't heard crappy things and we're looking at this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822107023 Which seems decent enough and has 8 bays which is nice. Any thoughts?
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Jun 24, 2009 16:31
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optikalus posted:Looks like a cheaper version of the Adaptec SnapAppliance, but the SnapAppliance has a decent OS and is proven reliable (ours has a few year uptime). I wouldn't use it for anything but archive. Huh. Well 2500 is our budget and I can't find good pricing info on SnapAppliance anywhere. We're looking at 6TB storage.
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Jun 24, 2009 20:34
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optikalus posted:Well, $2100 + tax and shipping doesn't leave you much room for drives, and I'd heavily recommend RAID6 for SATAs, so 8 1TB drives. Yeah there might be a little bit of flux we'll have to see. What's pricing like on SnapAppliances? I realize that's kind of a vague question, but any ideas? Thanks for the advice!
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Jun 24, 2009 21:15
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optikalus posted:Looks like Adaptec sold it to Overland, and I can't find any current pricing. I remember them running about $5k for an 8TB box. At that price, you might as well look at Hitachi as well. At that price I'm just gonna stab myself in the eye. So we have 1500 budgeted for a firewall. Only we need a very simple firewall (it's a simple simple simple network). So we're thinking maybe we can get a simple firewall for 400-700 and use the rest for drives?? Any firewall ideas?
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Jun 24, 2009 21:54
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What's the general process for replacing drives in a NAS with newer ones? Say you have an 8 bay NAS and they're all taken up and then 3 years down the line you want to replace the drives? How does that happen without just copying everything over to a duplicate NAS or whatever?
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Jun 26, 2009 16:19
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H110Hawk posted:Typically copy and replace is how it is done. With the way disk sizes grow you will likely be able to do some sideline magic where you take half of your new disks, make a quick software array on your current computer, copy data. Yank all of your disks from NAS, make software array, copy data. Put all new disks including original array into NAS and build, copy data final time. We do have an LTO2 system layin' around so I guess we could use that.
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Jun 26, 2009 17:26
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Long post incoming. I have a small situation that has me stumped and thrown headfirst into the world of SAN storage (of which I know nothing about). Intro: I work at a production house/ad agency and we used to have several other offices...times got tough and we've downsized into one office. Part of that had me driving around the country and collecting all of the equipment from other places. Most of which has remained in storage until now. Our shared storage system for one of our Avid went down. And rather than pay to replace it or get a standalone storage system they want to see if we can repurpose older equipment we have. We have no official IT or SysAdmin guys. Just me (an animator/director) and one of our coders trying to figure this all out. Inventory: So I went through and found what they used to use at our Tampa office. It consists of (excuse my lack of knowledge of the terminology): A 12 Drive BrightDrive RAID unit. The back of it has 2 HBA's (a term I just learned) with 2 fiber ports each (but only one of each is populated by the fiber “slider/tray/thingie”). It's this model: The RS-1220-x A BrightDrive server/controller. Has 3 80gig drives in it plus a CD-Rom. 1 single fiber port at the back of it. And ethernet/vga/keyboard/mouse of course. A 16 fiber port Sanbox 5600 switch. A Boxx workstation with XP Pro on it. First impressions: Ultimately I'm trying to figure out how each device fits into the pipeline. Our goal is to connect 1 avid to the RAID array via fiber so it can be worked off as a media drive system (not just slow mass storage). If other computers can connect to the array in the end that’s fine..but ultimately we just have one computer that definitely needs to use it. It appears that the BrightDrive Server connects to the BrightDrive RAID Array via fiber. Then the RAID connects to the switch via fiber and then the PCs connect into the switch via fiber (but that's just my random guessing). I'm pretty sure the Boxx was just used as a render farm distributor. However I noticed two things: 1.)When booting up to the BrightDrive Server it mentions can't find volume nl01 to load. I figure that's the RAID array. I have it connected via fiber (tried both HBAs) but it never detected it. 2.)Then when I booted up the Boxx I noticed that in My Computer there was an entry for a Samba share volume nl01. Did they just have the RAID array configured as a dumb volume? Oh...also booting up the BrightDrive server takes me to a login...of which I do not know the login or password. All the employees that knew all of this stuff and set it up are out of contact (although I have sent several emails out just in case). Pictures: Here are some pics just in case. The overall equipment setup - laid out on a table as I try to figure everything out.  The back of the BDS (BrightDrive Server/Controller).  Back of the 12 bay RAID array and it's HBAs.  And screenshot of the Samba connection from the Boxx workstation.  In Conclusion: So in summary, we just want to figure out how to set this up in a way where we can connect the Avid (which does have a fiber card) to this array via fiber so we can work off of it in a speedy fashion. Also while it would be nice to try to see what's on the drives now...if wiping and restarting ends up needing to be done that's not a big deal at all. big edit: So one of the old employees finally got in touch with me and basically said the system won't work with the Avid anyway because it needed a major upgrade to do so and it cost too much money (all of this info I didn't realize). He said I can try hooking up the RAID array directly via fiber to the AVID tower and see if that works. Also I tried booting up the controller again today and got a "8110 error severity: major" which seems to be a processor thing, so ... basically scratch my whole post.
BonoMan fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Mar 6, 2013 |
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Mar 6, 2013 16:18
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I'm looking for a Thunderbolt 2 enabled 1u or 2u (or hell 3u ... we have the space for it) storage system that can't exceed 27" in depth. We ordered the LaCie 12TB 8Big rackmount not realizing it was too deep (just barely). It's for a mobile DIT cart that will be out in the field and has to be closed up for transport so it HAS to fit that depth and it needs to be rackmounted for stability. 4 or 8 bay is enough and in the $1500-2000 range is preferable. It can be relatively dumb storage. We'll just be writing to it via a Blackmagic Mini Record in. edit: And the reason it's Thunderbolt 2 is because the mobo on the DIT machine has 2 x Thunderbolt 2 ports.
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Mar 11, 2015 15:31
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Hey guys I have a conceptual question as I'm new to all of this fiber what-nots. I do motion graphics and visual effects (and sometimes some editing) for an ad agency and our colorist is right next door to me. We're gonna get this QNAP Thunderbolt2/Fiber NAS/DAS combo: https://www.qnap.com/solution/thunderbolt-nas/en-us/index.php So that we can work on shared storage instead of constantly round-tripping to each other. Obviously we both need Fiber cards in our systems and a sort of fiber switch (a few more devices may connect in the future... also the thunderbolt 2 ports will be taken up by an LTO backup). But I'm not sure where to go besides that. Someone at work recommended this 10gig switch: http://www.amazon.com/NETGEAR-ProSA...=Netgear+XS712T and these cards: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106184 So I'm guessing Fiber goes from the QNAP to the Combo ports on those switches and then the Cat 6A/7 from the switches to the computer cards?
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Sep 25, 2015 14:48
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NippleFloss posted:There's no fiber in that config. The QNAP has 10G-BaseT ports, which are normal RJ-45 copper ports. Uh, what the hell? I don't know what I was looking at. I swear when I initially researched it it said fiber. As well as having cute little diagrams about how to setup the fiber switch. Now that I go back to it I can't find a single mention of anything like that anywhere on QNAPs site. Did I fall into a loving black hole or something?
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Sep 25, 2015 16:53
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Does anybody have any experience with Small Tree for video production workflows? We're building a centralized storage system for our production department (I had posted about some QNAPS previously which we abandoned). We don't have an onstaff IT/Network guy so we're looking at a turnkey solution. It was brought to my attention, but that's above my knowledge or paygrade so I thought I'd just ask here to see if there were any immediate "no stay far away!"s. Also they said that dual port 10GbE was unnecessary in the Windows environment and that single port 10GbE cards would be sufficient (there will be 4 to 6 systems connected at any given time and doing 4K editing off of the system). Thanks! https://www.small-tree.com/
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Nov 13, 2015 00:03
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So in our ongoing storage woes, upgrades we ended up purchasing 2 QNAP rack mounted systems (main + expansion) and have about 120TB connected through a 10GbE switch to everyone and all is good. Now we have 3 mini-sas raid enclosures (1 X 10 TB, 2 X 4 TB for 18 TB total) and drives that we want to create a sort of nearline backup that we'll use to dump to tape (an also mini-sas LTO 6 drive). We're looking for the cheapest solution to try to consolidate these into a single volume (for all intents and purposes). Getting another rackmount enclosure might make my boss balk at the cost. But for half we could get two 8 bay enclosures and daisy chain them? Something like this? http://www.amazon.com/Sans-Digital-Enclosure-Mini-SAS-TR8X/dp/B004WNLQ5E Don't know about that brand, but just using it as an example. the 10tb enclosure is the only one with two ports so we can't chain the other two to it.
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Dec 8, 2015 22:23
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BonoMan posted:So in our ongoing storage woes, upgrades we ended up purchasing 2 QNAP rack mounted systems (main + expansion) and have about 120TB connected through a 10GbE switch to everyone and all is good. nm with this by the way... someone walks in and goes "why not just sell the two small enclosures plus all the hard drives and just fill the large single SAS bay with 6 TB drives?" Problem solved. Forest for the trees and all that.
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Dec 9, 2015 04:52
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Cross-posting from the Mac Hardware thread. I work at an ad agency with full production capabilities. Our video team (of which I'm a part of) has a nice central storage with about 100 TBs. All 8 of our production machines just tap into it via 10GbE and we work off the drive. It's great and wonderful. We also have an 8 person interactive team on iMacs. Right now they're connected to an older NAS that isn't quite cutting it. They all tap into the general gigabit switch and the NAS is connected to that. But when they work with large files it really chokes. I know Macs don't have 10GbE connections (although I think there's a Thunderbolt -> 10GbE adapter?) but we'd like a similar setup. Rewiring all of their ethernet drops and then getting another 10GbE switch and other equipment to replicate our video setup is probably going to be expensive. We'd be fine with a locally placed Thunderbolt NAS (as opposed to rack mounted NAS' in our machine room like it is now). However I can't wrap my head around how you connect a lot of machines to a NAS via thunderbolt. There doesn't seem to be a Thunderbolt "switch" ... or am I just thinking about this all wrong?
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May 25, 2018 15:30
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Hoping this might be the right place to ask this question. I'm currently doing some research on upgrading our storage at work for a subset of workers. Now, my work doesn't and won't employ a regular IT or sysadmin person, so that's why me, a 3D/VFX guy is here asking this question (it's an uphill battle I've fought for years). We have about 8 designers at an ad agency that, at the moment, are accessing an old NAS storage system that's proved a bit slow for them. So we'd like to upgrade it. Currently our video team is accessing a nice 10GbE system and we all work from that 100TB of centralized storage. It's fast enough for us to do 4K video work off of. Love it. The designers want the same ability to be able to work off their own central storage like we do. At the moment, for large files (like their 1 gig photoshop files or large indesign projects), they usually just copy it over, work on it and move it back. They claim they get bogged down or crash when they try to work off the network. So my question is kind of two parts. Is the "style" of file access different for these two departments? I feel like the video projects read from the raw files "on the fly" whereas for larger print design projects, the computer usually tries to load that into memory and that may be causing the slowness they experience. That it doesn't really read photoshop files on the fly. And second is, should an upgraded NAS with trunked 1gig ports help alleviate this problem? Right now they're just connected to an old NAS through a single 1 gig port. Sorry if that's kind of a vague spaghetti question! Right now I'm just looking at upgrading to this (https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/ts-873u-rp) and just trunking the ports and calling it a day.
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Jul 18, 2018 16:05
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redeyes posted:I think you are on the right track with that Qnap product with the 10Gbe ports. 2x1Gb ports would yield double the speed at best. You might be running into a situation where your older NAS can't saturate gigabit but it's hard to say. I don't know off hand how photoshop handles caching huge files but do the workstations involved have enough RAM to load these 1GB files completely? They should. They're all fairly new iMacs and I've upgraded the RAM in all of them to 24 gigs or better. With that note, we won't be using the 10GbE like we do for the video side of things. The only way to do that, that I can tell, with the iMacs is to get expensive adapters and then run new cable for each one. Management would just lol in my face about that one!
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Jul 18, 2018 16:43
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Yeesh. I'm guessing y'all are talking about non-video products right? Most companies that use Adobe video software (premiere and after effects) work pretty exclusively from network shares (in some form or another).
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Jul 18, 2018 22:26
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Ha, I looked that up JUST as you were posting it. Jesus, Adobe. Way to be oblivious to how non-freelancer companies actually work.
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Jul 18, 2018 22:46
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Devian666 posted:Something I noted in a LTT video (link below) is that they were having multiple computers crash at the same time running adobe products. They found it was a network storage latency problem. They went to SSD servers. Probably not needed for indesign and photoshop, but obvious why they won't provide any support for network shares (their terrible code). Thanks I'll check it out when my kid goes to bed! Our video storage solution is all 10GbE to 100tb of central storage and it's changed our world. But that's totally PC based. The Macs to 10Gbe would be not doable in our current budget unfortunately.
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Jul 19, 2018 00:49
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Devian666 posted:Something I noted in a LTT video (link below) is that they were having multiple computers crash at the same time running adobe products. They found it was a network storage latency problem. They went to SSD servers. Probably not needed for indesign and photoshop, but obvious why they won't provide any support for network shares (their terrible code). So I ended up finally watching that video. Very neat and it's very similar to our setup minus the SSDs and watch folder server (although that's something we've thought about building). We basically do 50TB with realtime backup to another 50TB. All editor machines connected via 10GbE. Then things go to "nearline" after 6 months and then off to LTO after another few months. It's freakin' awesome and we work with RAW 4K RED footage all the time. We never transcode for editing. I love 10GbE. Even with our non-SSD hard drives it's blazing fast. Two problems - we have no offsite backup and management won't pay for it. Lol. And it cost about $25-30K and management won't pay for something even remotely similar for the non-video departments. I think best I'll be able to get for the non-video departments is maybe some SSD caching options with regular HDDs.
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Jul 19, 2018 15:00
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H110Hawk posted:Is that a typo that they really want to use 1/100,000th of the space? Because you're literally in a "any random computer with an nvme disk, enough ram to cache it all, and a 10G card" territory. Heck a rotational HDD or a "pro" SSD might serve you here based on the stats given. I think they're saying the files are around 1 gig in size... Not that they total 1 gig of used space.
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May 3, 2019 17:17
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H110Hawk posted:That makes so much more sense. I know the pain. I have a 4 year old and another one due in July. My brain has been mush for years now. BonoMan fucked around with this message at 17:39 on May 3, 2019 |
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May 3, 2019 17:32
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