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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Considering Xsan for RED workflow?

R

Robert P. Hogue

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I have some advice for anyone considering implementing Xsan in their RED Workflow - consider other options before jumping in. I made the unfortunate mistake, not realizing that XSAN is not trivial, along with the lack of learning resources out there. I say if you're not an IT type of guy, go with a solution from Studio Network Solutions, Small Tree's Granite Stor 10 Gigabit, or go with a turnkey solution like AVID Unity - too bad AVID does not have native REDCODE support.

http://xsansucks.blogspot.com/
 
Borzoifilms said:
I have some advice for anyone considering implementing Xsan in their RED Workflow - consider other options before jumping in. I made the unfortunate mistake, not realizing that XSAN is not trivial, along with the lack of learning resources out there. I say if you're not an IT type of guy, go with a solution from Studio Network Solutions, Small Tree's Granite Stor 10 Gigabit, or go with a turnkey solution like AVID Unity - too bad AVID does not have native REDCODE support.

http://xsansucks.blogspot.com/
Click to expand...

We have tested a number of SAN solutions - NONE of them are "perfect" and each has it's own advantages and disadvantages based on what, and how how you use them - XSAN in not "trivial" - but I don't think ANY SAN is "trivial" - especially when you are talking about large (2K / 4K DPX) file sequences.

We tested several "turn-key" solutions like Terrablock, etc. - and none lived up to our specific demands.

We currently run Offhollywood on Tiger Technologie's MetaSan - and, so far, I am very happy with their product.
 
Me, too, I've been working with two feature film projects and some TV commercial jobs at the same time, from Infotrend 16bay RAID with metaSANs been working pretty much great (I still have spotlight search problem), I can be rendering in Color or REDCINE while I'd be laying 10-bit 4:2:2 on HDCAM on another machine.
 
Id go with XSAN 2 not the older XSAN. You right it is not trivial. Id recommend catDV server as a SAN media management tool rather than FC Server, this is software that sits on top of XSAN 2.

Id recommend these guys www.quadlogic.co.uk they have US offices also. They have installed many SAN's large and small. I have no commercial connection with them other than being a happy client of theirs.
 
We have an Infortrend 14TB and a Apple XRaid 8TB and both work great with MetaSAN.

I will say that MetaSAN works 100% better if you buy an extra seat and put it on an XServe to run the metadata. They really market their idea of not having to use a server for their Metadata controller...but we found that to be less than perfect and had some serious crashes when running 3 or 4 seats without a dedicated controller. Now...we're crash free and it works perfectly.
 
Kevin,

That's true for me, too. metaSAN seems to work steady without failover feature.
 
At work we have a 11TB storage Xsan with two xserve MetaData controllers. We are running 5 workstation on this setup. I haven´t tried the speed lately but we used to get 3 streams of uncompressed HD. They have been up and running for almost two years now and works great. It´s nice that everyone get access to everything at all times...
/Christian
 
Metasan is good. I've ran it for a while and it's been pretty good, and easy to manage. But the best san is still no san, if you can at all do without one. If you need one, then look at Metasan.
 
no san is a good phrase Graeme.

Graeme, I'm having trouble with Spotlight with metaSAN, do you?
 
"SansSan" only in French speaking countries and provinces though.
 
Ah I see, didn't get it. Wish I knew some French then.
 
"sans" means without in French. Living here in Ottawa, you see the French words everywhere as we're just a few miles from the Quebec border.
 
X-san, fcp, red

X-san, fcp, red

Here at Postworks, we have an X-SAN meta controller, 2 X-Serves and a PromiseRAID, all hooked up to our 8-core Mac Pro.

The performance rivals that of our GlobalStore Assimilate Scratch workstation.

We are still running extensive and thorough tests but after assistance in setup by Apple directly, our initial imports with FCP's Log 'n Transfer and subsequent conversions via Compressor and Q-Master, the results are very, very impressive.

The fact that one can work with embedded audio in the RED media on a timeline and go to tape is a god send.

Scott
 
Mark L. Pederson said:
Spotlight sucks.

Start using EasyFind and you will never use Spotlight again - especially working with RDC/R3Ds, etc.
Click to expand...

Mark,

I do use EasyFind, but when you are in the open dialogs it's more direct to use the search feature in there which is Spotlight engine....so....
 
Help! Problems with XSAN2

Help! Problems with XSAN2

Hi guys. I've been visiting this forum for quite some time but I finally got myself to register. I'm having some problems with our SAN and any advice would be GREATLY appreciated.

Here's some background to explain our situation. We have 1 Intel Quad Core Mac Pro (single CPU), and around 10 editing station which are all home built PC's running either Windows XP 32, Windows Visa 32, or Windows Vista 64. We were always plagued by video data management. Whenever we had multiple people working on a project we would spend countless nights waiting for gigabytes (and sometimes terabytes) to copy from 1 editing station to another either through our LAN or using USB hard drives. Not only did the copying take time, but we would often lose track of which redundant files were no longer necessary and end up with terabytes of data that we couldn't erase.

About a month ago we invested in a SAN and assumed this would solve all of our problems. We currently have the following:

Promise Vtrak E-Class FD with 14 1TB drives, and 2 150GB drives in RAID 1 for metadata storage.

Qlogic FC Switch

1 Mac Pro running XSAN2 (as the sole Metadata controller)

4 Windows Vista 64 PCs all running Stornext FX2
(the client software needed to make PC's access the XSAN2 SAN)

1 Dell Ethernet switch (so that all of the XSAN2 metadata traffic is on a physically separate network from our LAN)

Here's the problem.

Everything seems to be working fine if only 1 computer is accessing the SAN. As soon as a second computer starts using the SAN, performance slows to crawling levels. File copies will start giving "Not Responding" messages, and editing software will stop responding while they wait for data to arrive on the SAN. What is strange is that when this happens, it seems like the data transfer rate is fine. On the other hand the latency of each transaction has suddeny skyrocketed to seconds, or minutes.

Has anyone experienced this before? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Hello Kei,

This doesn't really help you with your problem but my setup with two Mac Pros sharing Infotrend x16 RAID6 system with metaSAN can actually master to tape at the same time or one is rendering with Color and another doing the master to tape with 10-bit uncompressed. So the performance you're getting isn't the level you supposed to get.

I do hear degrading performance between HFS and NTFS, so you might want to look into that? Is there any transferring rate control?
 
Kaku,

Thanks for the info. As you say, I am pretty sure that some kind of bottle neck is preventing me from experience the full potential of my SAN. I just can't figure out what is the problem because all indicators are telling me that everything is OK. I'll keep researching.
 
Mark L. Pederson said:
We have tested a number of SAN solutions - NONE of them are "perfect" and each has it's own advantages and disadvantages based on what, and how how you use them - XSAN in not "trivial" - but I don't think ANY SAN is "trivial" - especially when you are talking about large (2K / 4K DPX) file sequences.

We tested several "turn-key" solutions like Terrablock, etc. - and none lived up to our specific demands.

We currently run Offhollywood on Tiger Technologie's MetaSan - and, so far, I am very happy with their product.
Click to expand...

Hi Mark, what hardware are you using for the SAN ? Lim
 
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