Video Storage

[mshill]

Hi All

 

The storage of videos is slowly starting to take over a lot of our server space. How do you all store your video/media files? should we expand our SAN or purchase a NAS box for the purpose of storing videos?

 

Regards

[fairm010]

We bought a dedicated NAS to hold all media (videos, images, music) . Works very well as a mapped drive called mediaonly.

 

Also create a rule to prevent them saving media into their home drive.

[mshill]

Any recommendations for a particular NAS box?

[unixman_again]

Ours are just on a W2003 server. We use Helix Media Server and it just drops the video files to the NTFS, after a long and complicated conversion process which I don't see the point off, but I guess the authors of HML has a good reason for doing what they did.

[fairm010]

We have a Buffalo Linkstation 2TB here and never had fault with it, although i've seen complaints on here that their rubbish.

 

It has sat in a comms cabinet for 3 years now and never had to touch it.

 

Cheap too!

 

Buffalo LinkStation Live 2TB NAS (LS-X2.0TL-EU) - www.misco.co.uk

[mshill]

Do you back up the data from the NAS Box?

[fairm010]

Yes, it has a built in backup facility that we backup to our SAN in another building.

[dhicks]

The storage of videos is slowly starting to take over a lot of our server space.

 

Indeed. Ideally, what you want is a Media Asset Management server - something to take care of converting, indexing and presenting images and video for you. There are various systems around (Oxfam's one looks particularly good), but nothing I've seen so far that really seems geared specifically towards schools. I'd go for a dedicated NAS box running FreeNAS for the moment - FreeNAS' ability to deduplicate data should come in particularly handy with images and video, where you often seem to get the same image copied into several locations. Make sure you get hardware with enough RAM - I'm currently looking at getting an Intel NUC with 16GB of RAM as a storage server.