Storage and streaming for HD

[Alex-)]

Hello,

as far as I know, it's impossible to buy complete solution for centralized file storage from Digidesign, simply because it doesn't exist. However, some companies like Studio Network Solutions offer storage systems "especially" designed for Protools.

I will be happy to get any idea from somebody who are using such solution from SNS or some other company with about 10 to 20 HD3 workstations. Is it flowless storage solution or that can give more troubles than benefits? Could you give some idea about what storage system it better in use, are there any limitations etc.. Also if you had issues with these storage solutions - could you please describe how critical are they?

Also its quite interesting - is it possible to use just some general iSCSI solution (not SNS and other "optimised" one)?

Thanks in advance, any advice is valuable and highly appreciated!

[the dude]

I do consulting and installation for these products

My link and email is below

[Ale]

Look for products from ardis

http://www.ardistech.com/main.html?id=13&lang=

Quite a few studios and even some TV stations switched to this system last year. (Here in germany)

I am also interested in this system because it seems to be more flexible than "SNS"
Unfortunately it is quite expensive.

The guys told me:
With the solution from SNS it is not possible to mount the same drive with different stations because of the user rights. So you still have to copy whole data and everything keeps complex.
With ardis you can acces the sake project folder.

Hope this information is right but thats what I have been told.

Ale


Here are some other threads with this topic

http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=224471
http://duc.digidesign.com/showthread.php?t=233763

[Alex-)]

Thanks Ale,

Ardis looks good, I'm sure finally this system will be more flexible than SNS. I'll check this.

Also the next question quite interesting - anybody using iSCSI with PT8?? As I now from some threads, there are problems exists with PT in version 7.4 because of "Elastic" feauture, on SNS systems.

Could somebody give me an idea - what's going on with "Elastic" with iSCSI storage systems with version 8?

Info about issues with Ardis storage will be also appreciated!

Thanks in advance!
Alex

[mtung]

I too am curious as to how these systems are working with PT8. I have demoed the SNS X-4 with PT 7.3 (before elastic audio came out) and it was great. I could open the same session from two different control rooms and read from the same pool of audio files. I only had to save a local copy of the session on the machine that didn't have rights to write to the partition the session was on. Elastic audio changed all that cause as soon as you put on elastic audio on a track, that track cannot be enabled in any other session even though you simply want to read the audio files. So, as long as you don't use elastic anything, you can do this with the SNS on 7.4. I haven't tried it with PT8.

Anyone?

mike

[O.G. Killa]

I run four X4's from SNS on a 9 workstation system running PT7.4.2 on all machines (3 PT HD, 6 PT LE).

I haven't had any problems with Elastic audio on our systems.

Also, you don't have to copy projects from one drive to the other for multiple users. Yes, SNS only allows one user to login to a drive as "read/write" at a time... but any others can log in as "read only" to review, etc.

What we do here is partition the X4's into 10 smaller drives (about 80 GB) each, instead of two large 500GB drives per X4. We have one or two projects live on each drive partition. That way multiple people can be working off the same X4 at the same time, just so long as the project isn't in the same partition...

And also if there are shared assets like sound effects or OMF files or music libraries, you can leave the assets on one drive that everyone logs into as "read only" and then you can have one drive for whatever you are going to record or multiple drives for different aspects of the project that you need to record (i.e. one partition for Foley, another for ADR, and other for SFX editing, another for dialogue editing, etc...) they can all read the shared assets from the read only drives as it plays, but then any new material gets recorded onto it's read/write partition...

For music, which is how we use it, each new project goes on a new drive. Since we have so many partitions, we never run into an issue where two current projects are on the same partition... we have 3 studios and 6 editing bays, We will track drums and bass in Studio A onto Drive 1, the next day we open that project in the smaller editing bays to beat detective drums and the big room starts a new project recording strings, brass, whatever, onto Drive 2... then on the 3rd day, the first project on Drive 1 has been edited and we open it in the studio B to track guitars, while the second project on Drive 2 is being editing in one of the bays, and so on... At any given moment we have between 8 and 14 different CDs at some point in the production process. We have never had any file management/sharing problems and we don't have to constantly keep copying the projects to different drives for different people to work on them. Everything for each project is kept together and we open it it different rooms and do whatever needs to be done.

I highly recommend SNS. I haven't checked out Ardis. Just make sure protools will run using it. Protools will not run off any network volumes, the volume has to be mounted as an INTERNAL volume. the SANmp driver helps "trick" the computer into thinking that the SNS volumes are actually internal volumes and not NAS. And using iSCSI with SANmp we can track 96 tracks at 96KHz and have no hiccups or "hard drive too slow errors". No need for Fibre channel unless you are doing video too.

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by O.G. Killa

Yes, SNS only allows one user to login to a drive as "read/write" at a time... but any others can log in as "read only" to review, etc.

This is because SNS, and any other system with the same limitation, is sharing at the volume level, not the file or block level. I wish Digidesign would add support for Xsan.

[Alex-)]

Wow! So many different opinions! As the way it should be!

Thanks to everyone, it's great to read your experience...


O.G. Killa - Thank you, this information is valuable, and idea to have a lot of partitions is quite good, but it looks like it's necessary to make a daily schedule for using the storage Have you got a queue in the studio? That's just a joke... Thanks again for this information, I think SNS is one of possible solutions for us.

Is there anybody using Ardis?

It will be very good to hear succes story with Ardis storage. Many people can recommend this system, saying DDP feature is awesome, but I guess nobody have experience with it...

Could you please give me your opinion on Ardis?

Once again - thanks to everyone!
Alex

[mtung]

OG,

Can you have two people working on the same song at the same time from the same files? One has read/write access and the other only read access (saving a session file localy or on another partition)? My hope is to have two control rooms working on the same song. I have my assistant prep stuff for me while I have already started working. Finding out that a vocal needs tuning while I am in the middle of a mix, for example. Or editing drums while I am working on other things. My experience with 7.4 and SNS has been that as soon as a track has elastic audio on it, it isn't even openable on more than one session. I can open the other tracks from the session, but all tracks that have elastic audio will be disabled on the read only user.

Any ideas?

mike

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by mtung

OG,

Can you have two people working on the same song at the same time from the same files? One has read/write access and the other only read access (saving a session file localy or on another partition)? My hope is to have two control rooms working on the same song. I have my assistant prep stuff for me while I have already started working. Finding out that a vocal needs tuning while I am in the middle of a mix, for example. Or editing drums while I am working on other things. My experience with 7.4 and SNS has been that as soon as a track has elastic audio on it, it isn't even openable on more than one session. I can open the other tracks from the session, but all tracks that have elastic audio will be disabled on the read only user.

Any ideas?

mike

yeah this is totally doable. If your assistant logs in as read-only, they can save just the protools session file to their internal hard drive or another network volume, do editing, automation, etc... If they end up creating any new audio files (like printing Audiosuite effects), they just have to make sure to copy those back over into the original project's audio files folder for you to see them.

As for the elastic audio, I'm not sure. I've used elastic audio quite a bit on the SNS drives... but never in the manner you mention. I'll try it and see what happens to me.