nas server setup

[kylewilliamson]

Powerpoint.. yes... but Premier????

 

Your going to need some serious throughput for Premier..

[dhicks]

Kind of be on a much larger scale, think more along the lines of a GPU with multiple stream processors.

 

Time for me to go and investigate RAID controllers a bit I think. Nice to talk to someone who knows how stuff actually works for a change!

 

Unfortunately NCQ only really got picked up by Seagate

 

Damn - from reading the Wikipedia entry on NCQ you get the impression it comes as standard on all SATA drives.

 

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David Hicks

[dhicks]

Your going to need some serious throughput for Premier..

 

Did the original poster want to store video files or just Premier files, i.e. just the project files (with locally stored footage)? The latter should work, the former... like you say, you'd need serious throughput. I'm not even going to bother asking how much we'd need to spend on a NAS device capable of handling video being edited from 20 separate workstations, I'm going for local storage (synced overnight to a central server, of course).

 

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David Hicks

[DMcCoy]

Do also look at sensible RAID edition drives. I like the seagate ones, not always the fastest but usually a 5 year warranty, 24x7 uptime rating and higher MTBF.

[dhicks]

Do also look at sensible RAID edition drives. I like the seagate ones, not always the fastest but usually a 5 year warranty, 24x7 uptime rating and higher MTBF.

 

I thought the whole idea behind RAID was that the disks were inexpensive? I figure that means simply buying the fastest drives you can get for the minimum amount of money. If a drive goes - still a relatively rare occurrence, even for drives without top-rated MTBF figures - it's just a case of swapping in a spare and waiting for the array to rebuild. This might slow performance for a few hours, but I figure that's acceptable in most schools.

 

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David Hicks

[DMcCoy]

I thought the whole idea behind RAID was that the disks were inexpensive? I figure that means simply buying the fastest drives you can get for the minimum amount of money. If a drive goes - still a relatively rare occurrence, even for drives without top-rated MTBF figures - it's just a case of swapping in a spare and waiting for the array to rebuild. This might slow performance for a few hours, but I figure that's acceptable in most schools.

 

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David Hicks

 

RAID controllers are quite happy to mirror corruption, the name has never really been relevant, especially when it was only scsi disks!

 

If you do not also have a full and recent backup then you should get the most reliable disks you can to reduce the chance of multiple disk failures. You might even want a hot spare.

 

RAID is more for uptime than anything else, it's certainly not a backup method

[dhicks]

RAID controllers are quite happy to mirror corruption

 

Isn't that the job of the RAID controller or file system to take care of, though?

 

I figure all disks are going to fail eventually, so might as well go with the hot-spare option. I understand about RAID by itself not being a backup strategy, though - accidentally delete a file from a RAID array and it's still deleted!

 

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David Hicks

[SYNACK]

I thought the whole idea behind RAID was that the disks were inexpensive? I figure that means simply buying the fastest drives you can get for the minimum amount of money. If a drive goes - still a relatively rare occurrence, even for drives without top-rated MTBF figures - it's just a case of swapping in a spare and waiting for the array to rebuild. This might slow performance for a few hours, but I figure that's acceptable in most schools.

 

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David Hicks

 

Yes the meaning of the 'I' is still contested between inexpensive and independent unfortunately. The RAID edition disks that DMcCoy is referring to are simply designed better for use in a server platform, they are designed to be run constantly and have a much longer rated lifespan when compared to standard desktop drives. These are less likely to fail from shear mechanical use than consumer drives and the firmware on them is more rigorously checked, sometimes even upgraded unlike consumer drives.

 

There was an issue a while back with some of the 700gb consumer Seagate drives. Revision A(or B can't remember) which used the firmware from server grade drives was really quick and the drive became sought after. The newer drives Rev C I think came out with different firmware and were a lot slower than the originals. This to the best of my knowledge was never fixed on those Rev C drives. If these were server drives then this would most probably have been sorted by a firmware upgrade or more likely the drives would not have been released with that flaw.

 

You can run consumer grade disks in a RAID system but it depends on the goals you have for your system if this is the right approach. If your goal is a high avalibility drive that runs as fast and is as reliable as possible then you will want to spend the little bit extra and get server rated drives. If you want a large storage space that goes quite quickly but may need disks replacing more often you can use consumer disks, overall though the sever grade ones are more likely to handle heavy loads gracefully.

 

The last time I checked with my suppliers the premium for the Seagate server grade SATA drives was along the lines of $70(GBP £27) on $700(GBP £270) drives so it may be worth checking the difference with your suppliers.

Edited April 6, 2008 by SYNACK

[DMcCoy]

Isn't that the job of the RAID controller or file system to take care of, though?

 

I figure all disks are going to fail eventually, so might as well go with the hot-spare option. I understand about RAID by itself not being a backup strategy, though - accidentally delete a file from a RAID array and it's still deleted!

 

--

David Hicks

 

It is, yes. I've had less problem with raid 5, but I've seen a raid 1 setup take out both drives in the past. It's better now as with smart monitoring things like reallocated sector count. The backup bit was more a general comment about RAID's failings rather than suggesting you or anyone else thought of it as backup

 

The highest risk will be during a resync when the disks are under higher load, and temperatures etc.

 

Cheap disks can be used if you wish, it's just that reliability can still be an additional factor sometimes even with RAID.

[torledo]

RAID controllers are quite happy to mirror corruption, the name has never really been relevant, especially when it was only scsi disks!

 

If you do not also have a full and recent backup then you should get the most reliable disks you can to reduce the chance of multiple disk failures. You might even want a hot spare.

 

RAID is more for uptime than anything else, it's certainly not a backup method

 

Absolutely right. Although i would go so far as to say a hot spare in a raid 5 setup should be seen as a necessity. Simply becuase of a risk of a second drive failure during a potentially lengthy rebuild process from a first disk failure. Raid 6 has the double parity insurance but hardly anyone is using raid 6 other than storevault/netapp customers because of the performance penalty. And netapp customers will have atleast one hot spare per shelf even with raid 6 - they're a cautious bunch storage admins. And they'll spend the dough on the tape and disk products for that peace of mind.

 

@dhicks - unfortuantely theres' not a lot of info on best practice for networked video....plenty of info on sql, exchange and general nfs/cifs file sharing. The only thing to do is look at the best practice for storage of large files for presentation over cifs/nfs.

 

For any premiere or final cut pro type networked video you'll need as fast a connection to clients as possible, adapter bonding on NAS or NAS head such as x86 server, and loads of spindles in a RAID group optimised for performance. So that is RAID 10 or similar, yes it's wasteful of disks but SATA drives and SAS are good valie, no need to look beyond SATA or perefrably SAS in terms of disk performance requirements for such a solution.

[SYNACK]

Further my last post...

 

I just looked up my quotes from then, the Seagate server graded stuff is branded ES and back in last November I could get 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES 7200.2, 32MB, SATAII drives for $515 each when the comparative desktop drives were around $470

[PeterW]

Damn - from reading the Wikipedia entry on NCQ you get the impression it comes as standard on all SATA drives.

 

Some models from Old Maxtor, Samsung & Western Digital all have NCQ.

 

I have a 3 year old 200GB Maxtor at home with NCQ.

[dhicks]

For any premiere or final cut pro type networked video you'll need as fast a connection to clients as possible, adapter bonding on NAS or NAS head such as x86 server, and loads of spindles in a RAID group optimised for performance.

 

"Loads of spindles"... Hmm... Right, so the original post was talking about a NAS server for (we think) video files - we all agree that's going to need a hefty bit of kit. Unless... would the best way to get the "loads of spindles" part be to create a distributed file system across the workstations? Assume each workstation has gigabit ethernet, we have a decent switch to connect them all together, and that all the workstations are on during the day when they are being used. Could we, say, partition the harddrive of each workstation and share half of it out to a central pool of some kind? Maybe two Samaba shares per workstation, linked by a central server, with duplication of shares between different workstations for redundancy? Or set each machine up as an iSCISI (or AoE) server, have each one export a couple of partitions as block devices available to a central SAN device of some kind?

 

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David Hicks

[torledo]

"Loads of spindles"... Hmm... Right, so the original post was talking about a NAS server for (we think) video files - we all agree that's going to need a hefty bit of kit. Unless... would the best way to get the "loads of spindles" part be to create a distributed file system across the workstations? Assume each workstation has gigabit ethernet, we have a decent switch to connect them all together, and that all the workstations are on during the day when they are being used. Could we, say, partition the harddrive of each workstation and share half of it out to a central pool of some kind? Maybe two Samaba shares per workstation, linked by a central server, with duplication of shares between different workstations for redundancy? Or set each machine up as an iSCISI (or AoE) server, have each one export a couple of partitions as block devices available to a central SAN device of some kind?

 

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David Hicks

 

Easiest thing todo would be to have a 12 disk NAS appliance or 12 to 16 disk external SAS shelf connecting to the NAS server. The only kind of distributed workload i personally would contemplate implementing is something like qmaster on the mac which effectively uses the cpu of multiple machines working in the background to reduce completion times for large DVD authoring projects. But that's more additional cpu rather than more storage requirement. Don't know if there's a similar grid-esque method for use with premiere to reduce render times....but again that wouldn't solve solve the storage size and perfomance issues, for that i'd recommend a big array - less hassle, and you've got a centralized pool of storage. Alternatively you're stuck with working locally.

 

If you've got a big fast central array...whether it be iscsi, NAS or fc san, you wouldn't need to bother with having the clients connect via a block protocol like iscsi - although performance wise it would probably be the best method. Conencting that many clients to a single array obviously brings up access issues because we're talking about a block storage access protocol.

 

However if the clients connected via cifs to the NAS or to a NAS head, you could carve up a single raid group and a single volume for all clients to access and work from. Security would be a breeze to setup through ACL's inherent in the file access protocols.

 

I just don't think 4 disks would cut it....it doesn;t matter how fast the connection to the NAS or NAS head is whether it be 10gbps or 4x1gps bonded, the critical performance bottleneck would be those 4 7200rpm spindles.....that's if they wanted to work from project files directly from the NAS/NAS head.

Edited April 7, 2008 by torledo

[PEO]

mmmm now im a little confused of what i should do about video storage for premier.

 

Should i go for local storage. install a sep SATA hd?

 

the big problem i have at the moment is Im getting low on storage space, on the domain controller. 5Gb left to be exact. I figured a nas server would be ideal for holding thouse big powerpoint, pluss im going to be installing premier and thought nas would be the most cost effective solution. If i was to use nas for this, would i experience poor network performance?

[PEO]

also does freenas support ntfs. I would need set permissions for each user folder

[torledo]

mmmm now im a little confused of what i should do about video storage for premier.

 

Should i go for local storage. install a sep SATA hd?

 

the big problem i have at the moment is Im getting low on storage space, on the domain controller. 5Gb left to be exact. I figured a nas server would be ideal for holding thouse big powerpoint, pluss im going to be installing premier and thought nas would be the most cost effective solution. If i was to use nas for this, would i experience poor network performance?

 

Storage of premier files shouldn't be an issue on the nas with 500gb+ of usable storage. Where the issues are would be uses working from project files on the NAS, as a minimum you'd need to use a RAID stripe....that leaves you with good performance but no fault tolerance. A raid 10 would provide you with the fault tolerance plus performance but you'd lose half you're raw capacity, a RAID 5 probably wouldn't be good enough performance wise.....

 

That's the reason i don't like 4 disk arrays, they're too limited. The best way is to try it out, you might find differing results to what i've described. But with potentially 20 users working on project file at the same time, a networked video solution needs to be of sufficient - both in terms of network speeds and disk perforamance to cope.

[PEO]

there will be times where upto 60 users will be working on premier

[dhicks]

However if the clients connected via cifs to the NAS or to a NAS head, you could carve up a single raid group and a single volume for all clients to access and work from.

 

NAS head... I see that Samba can store "pointers" to other file systems, like symbolic links but across networked volumes. I'm thinking a central Samba server stored entirely on a RAM disk, with a file system that basically consists of a bunch of links to other file systems (which happen to be stored on individual workstations)...

 

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David Hicks

[torledo]

there will be times where upto 60 users will be working on premier

 

Woh!!!

 

Can we be clear, do you anticipate project files to be worked on locally and then copied to the server on completion ? Or are you intending for this number of users to be working from project files directly on the NAS i.e the most convenient method.

 

If it's the latter you'll really need to look at you're network and server infrastrtucre to see if it can cope. I'll try and put some figures together based on users working with compressed 25mbps SD DV streams over a tcp connection to a NAS or NAS head.....but i would maybe advise you to look at a local editing method. Or at the least split the computers over several servers. What i mean by that is that for 4 or 5 DV streams in premiere the performance requirements are quite modest, so you could get away with having a PC equipped with a fw drive or external firewire 3/4 disk caddy acting as the 'server'. You might want to investigate what dhicks was mentioning also, as that sounds like it could be more elegant than what i'm suggesting. I'm really not that familiar with distributed methods,

Edited April 7, 2008 by torledo

[dhicks]

there will be times where upto 60 users will be working on premier

 

Can we just get this straight: do you mean you want to store a whole bunch of raw video footage (12GB/hour DV footage, or 640X480 AVI files from a point-and-shoot camera, or whatever), Premier thumbnail video preview files and rendered footage on one central file server? Or do you just want to store Premier project files (i.e. just the data file that says where everything else is) on the file server and have video stored locally?

 

You will need a big server to manage 60 people all editing full video files at once - the sort of thing that starts at around £10,000 and works up from there.

 

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David Hicks

[torledo]

Can we just get this straight: do you mean you want to store a whole bunch of raw video footage (12GB/hour DV footage, or 640X480 AVI files from a point-and-shoot camera, or whatever), Premier thumbnail video preview files and rendered footage on one central file server? Or do you just want to store Premier project files (i.e. just the data file that says where everything else is) on the file server and have video stored locally?

 

You will need a big server to manage 60 people all editing full video files at once - the sort of thing that starts at around £10,000 and works up from there.

 

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David Hicks

 

I agree.

 

Unfortunately most of the technical data available regardign gigE delivery concerns FCP on the mac. Doesn't appear to be much info regardign premiere or any kind of white papers or best practive.....shame on you adobe. Apple and the apple community appear to be much better in that regard.

 

Haven't bothered to look for Avid info, but i'd imagine the principle aren't too disimalr to what FCP best practice is.

 

Considering the lack of adobe info i would guess you'll need a powerful server, lot of RAM and that all important disk subsystem. Post-production houses have FC arrays for their workflow and that would be my chioce if i had the money. That or a top notch NAS server or NAS gateway. Lot of specialists selling these FC or SAS arrays for video professionals (to indie types for instance)...but as dhicks says you're looking at a starting point of 10k even if you go with one of the smaller vendors rather than EMC or HP for instance.

 

@mrhappy - i think myself and dhicks posed similar questions. but dhicks is more

accurate. I'm coming from an imovie / FCP background.....you and he are more familiar with the premiere environment where project files as i come to understand them means something slightly different in premiere.

Edited April 7, 2008 by torledo

[PEO]

I agree.

 

Unfortunately most of the technical data available regardign gigE delivery concerns FCP on the mac. Doesn't appear to be much info regardign premiere or any kind of white papers or best practive.....shame on you adobe. Apple and the apple community appear to be much better in that regard.

 

Haven't bothered to look for Avid info, but i'd imagine the principle aren't too disimalr to what FCP best practice is.

 

Considering the lack of adobe info i would guess you'll need a powerful server, lot of RAM and that all important disk subsystem. Post-production houses have FC arrays for their workflow and that would be my chioce if i had the money. That or a top notch NAS server or NAS gateway. Lot of specialists selling these FC or SAS arrays for video professionals (to indie types for instance)...but as dhicks says you're looking at a starting point of 10k even if you go with one of the smaller vendors rather than EMC or HP for instance.

 

@mrhappy - i think myself and dhicks posed similar questions. but dhicks is more

accurate. I'm coming from an imovie / FCP background.....you and he are more familiar with the premiere environment where project files as i come to understand them means something slightly different in premiere.

 

Ok Im going to install sata drives on the machines. after reading what you all have said it seems what i thought would be ok is going to be expensive and not practical for the school enviroment.

 

May be i could have them all SYNC once a week to a nas server.

[dhicks]

May be i could have them all SYNC once a week to a nas server.

 

This is what I figured too - anything capable of dishing out video to our 20 simultaneous clients was going to be way to expensive (and noisy!) for us. We can cheat slightly in that we're an independent school so we can say things like "all those who take the video editing option must provide their own external hard drive (available for £80 from Mr Hicks)" - I was going to make sure our workstations had either FireWire 800 or eSATA ports. Only problem is if a pupil looses/drops/breaks/eats/whatever the damn thing...

 

For file synchronisation, I should think overnight every night should be a realistic option - that means that a teacher can place some video files on a central server one day and they'll be copied out to each workstation overnight (something involving multicast here would be a good idea...). Same goes for user files being copied back to the server - it shouldn't be difficult to get a script to make sure all the permissions and whatnot match up between a directory on the server and on each workstation.

 

Now that I've thought of it, though, I'm still keen to try that distributed file system...

 

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David Hicks

[DMcCoy]

If you are syncing to a share from windows you may well need to stagger the connections to avoid the dreaded "delayed write failed" message if your storage box can't respond in quickly enough.