Shared Storage for PT Editors

[sleadley]

I just wondered if there were any opinions on the various shared storage solutions and whether anyone had any positive or negative experiences that they might care to share with me. I want to have shared storage for a small workgroup of editors on a feature film where we use a centalised storage unit (preferably over Ethernet rather than fibre) where session can be opened and Audio and video is played from that same storage to alleviate the bottlenecks and problems of working locally on FW drives. Price is important but reliability and ease of setup are paramount. We would be looking at a small amount of storage but hoping that it could be easily scaled if the need arises.
Any comments welcome form all quarters.
best regards
Simon L.

[myke2242]

Somethings would help to know like. How many people are we talking about here. will picture be DV, HDV, HD, 4k?

[sleadley]

Around 4 editors with 48k or 96k sessions (the 96k sessions will be score editing) the 48 k sessions for most temp Music editing work.
The pictures will be MJPEG A or meridian Avid SD files. Meduim density editing say around 48 tracks with Movie for 3-4 editors. Pro Tools 7.4.2 on Leopard with mostly G5 systems HD Accel 2's.
Any more info let me know what I can provide.
S.

[mikevarela]

not to sure about ethernet as viable for serving up streaming media, even though it does have a high bandwidth, it really wasn't setup to serve long sessions of critical data. Fibre is better, but also very expensive.

if your just sharing the files, not reeltime editing, then the lacie ethernet drives are great, i use them all the time. if you are however gonna do some realtime stuff, fibre is best. you might also want to check out esata.

in any case, storage gets expensive, especially when you consider redundancy.

I've worked in a studio that used the apple drive array, which now I think has been supplanted by another more efficient company, though your probably really looking at around 5-10k.

I've had lots of success with facilis.

check out promise too

[sleadley]

My research has shown that many systems now boast very impressive figures over 1000 base Ethernet (In real time) Systems that use SATA over Ethernet seem, on the surface to have plenty of bandwidth. I agree that Fibre is best but is expensive and difficult to implement wheras the newer Ethernet based solutions seems to work (if you believe the hype) but I am interested in some real world experience. iSCSI seems to also be pretty impressive, I have seen this work for video editing stations and I am told it does work for Pro Tools as well.
Thanks for your insight in advance,
Simon L.

[espron]

I have done some testing of a SNS globalsan x-4 system, which uses iscsi rather than fiber. The system works just fine allowing for all the things you mentioned. However, this system only supports two users. If you need additional users, both SNS and other manufacturers offer bigger systems.

All in all iscsi has worked very well, allowing for heavy use from the two connected workstations at the same time. Some people have had bad experiences with shared storage since PT 7.4, experiencing an increase in -9073 errors, but at our facility this has not been a problem.

Espen

[sleadley]

Dear Espen,
thanks for your reply. I will be looking at the SNS stuff as well they have some new products that may do the trick but I don't want to be a beta tester for shared storage on the project that we are working on as the pressure will be on to be as efficient as possible.
thanks again
Simon L.

[Craig F]

EditShare and Dynamic Drive Pool also do iSCSI systems that looks reliable

you might want to look at a 10 Gb link server to switch then use 1 Gb from switch to computer
it will probably be cheaper than fiber

[AVGuru1]

Cost is what is gonna murder you.

Shared storage, with RAID protection, is what drives the price up.

I love Facilis. iSCSI capable, and with 8gig and multiple write on the horizon..along with dead easy admining...can't beat it.

Cal Digit has some storage, and I believe they were touting making their storage networkable & shareable, which would make it cheap.

Editshare is harder to admin, and I find not as fast as Facilis.

Got Money? Go Unity. Not my fav, however.

[Craig F]

Got Money? Go Unity.

limited to 6 seats via fiber on PC only; not a solution make