Sneakernet vs. Shared Storage for small post facility?

[tomcat]

Opinions please. I am building a post facility in ny and i need to decide on my approach to data management. I am looking at the terrablock system, and it looks pretty great, but I hear a lot of people having tried to do a san, gotten frustrated with its complexity, and are happily back on sneakers.

my place will have:

2 avid rooms
3 protools editing stations
1 adr/foley recording room and its control room
2 mix rooms

we do mostly indie features, but will be going after some tv and commercial work as well.

I am looking at a 12 terrbyte system running a raid parity that will cost about 38k.

what do the people say?

thanks

[C]

Make absolutely sure that whatever system you go for has been tested with Pro Tools specifically. Avid's seem to work quite happily with remote storage systems and RAID's etc but PT may only see the Terrablock as an audio transfer drive/picture playback drive.

Their documentation on the site doesn't fill me with confidence about it's compatability with PT. Ask the question specifically and don't accept any rubbish from the sales rep about video throughput rates being higher than audio throughput rates so it will of course work...that is NOT the issue.


C

[greenwood]

Tom

Check this out www.dynamicdrivepool.com we have used this system for the past 18 months. 6 PTools systems connected playing back 80+ track counts and video (dv25 via V10), all over ethernet using iSCSI. Has 3.5T of storage raid 5 protected, never had any problems with it. You can move projects between rooms in seconds.



Regards

Tony

[CLee]

We have 4 rooms with a Fibre network (we use FibreShare by Charismac) and I'm loving it. 4 rooms all working on the same project with no sneakerneting and no duplicate sound files on different drives. Wouldn't work any other way. Also, per drive track counts are fantastic.

Keep in mind, as far as I know, RAID systems are not compatible with PT.

[Rick Sanchez]

I would put each ProTools system on fixed firewire drives and use gigabit ethernet to transfer to shared storage for backups as well as transfering OMFs and sessions between rooms. That will give you a lot of flexibility, security as well as offering a very quick and relatively inexpensive backup and transfer system. I was running 11 Avids (with unity for the video server), 3 ProTools HD systems and 8 Graphics workstations with an Apple server and Xraid for shared storage, backups and transfers. 5 years with only around 10 hours of downtime.

[Rick Sanchez]

I would put each ProTools system on fixed firewire drives and use gigabit ethernet to transfer to shared storage for backups as well as transfering OMFs and sessions between rooms. That will give you a lot of flexibility, security as well as offering a very quick and relatively inexpensive backup and transfer system. I was running 11 Avids (with unity for the video server), 3 ProTools HD systems and 8 Graphics workstations with an Apple server and Xraid for shared storage, backups and transfers. 5 years with only around 10 hours of downtime.

[Tiago Silva]

Everything was going peachy with our SNS network until Avid dropped the ball on MacIntel support and we were forced to buy two Avid Adrenalines on Wintel last year. Nowadays the "cross-platform" side of SANmp is very "crossed". Like, for example, an NTFS SANmp volume from an Avid being unable to be the source drive for an OMF-Linked export, because "it's not a valid ProTools audio drive" - it's "Transfer". It's a valid Protools video drive, though. Then it stops writing the session backups to the HFS+ sound volume because of an "assertion" somewhere.

So, whatever you do, don't mix platforms.