Mac Mini based media server for multiple offline editors - Configuration

[Philipp Meier]

Hi guys,I have an upcoming project that requires 4 editors on 2012 iMac's to have access to a shared media server. We can't afford a 100k+ media solution so I am thinking about building a custom, ethernet based, media server for our offline ProRes workflow. Here is the idea:

Hardware:

• 2012 Mac Mini Server - $999
• Sonnect xMac mini server enclosure - $1,300 (link)
• Small Tree GbE PEG4L PCI Card with 4x 1Gb/s ethernet ports - $730 (link)
• Promise Pegasus R6 18TB Thunderbolt RAID (650MB/s in RAID5) - $3,000 (link)
• 4x 2012 iMac edit stations
• A 1Gb/s Ethernet switch

Configuration:

The Pegasus R6 will hold the ProRes media and connect to the xMac Mini server via thunderbolt. The internal Mac Mini ethernet port will be linked together with the four PEG4L ethernet ports and connected via five CAT5 cables to an 1GB/s ethernet switch to provide a 5Gb/s backbone to the server. The 4 iMacs will use the build-in 1Gb/s ethernet port to connect to the ethernet switch with one CAT5 cable each.


Theoretic Data Speeds:

• ProRes HQ Media - 25MB/s
• ProRes Media - 17MB/s
• ProRes LT Media - 12MB/s
• Single iMac 1Gb/s ethernet connection to switch - 120MB/s Max / 100MB/s real world (assumption)
• 5GB/s backbone connection from switch to Mac Mini - 600MB/s Max / 500MB/s real world (assumption)
• Pegasus R6 - 650MB/s

So in THEORY this setup should allow each of the 4 iMac's to pull 100MB/s simultaneously from the server (even a 5th iMac should work). That would allow for 4 ProRes HQ, 5 ProRes, or 8 ProRes LT streams to each machine at the same time. This custom, 18TB, media server would cost $6,000.

What do you guys think? Is this feasible or just a pipe dream?

Really looking forward to your thoughts.

Philipp

 

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

We at our work recently have 3 Thunderbolt Pegasus R6's, a Mac Mini i7 server, and a Atto Thunderbolt to 10GB Ethernet, and a switch (don't know which one). I'm an editor, and not the tech-head who put it all together (we had a company installing it), but we are happy with results. We just use Retina Macbook Pro's with an Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter. We already had one editor playing 6 streams of Prores LT in FCPX, together as picture in pictures, all with a timecode generator applied to it. It played well, although fast-forwarding for instance was a bit choppy, but we didn't expect differently.

http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?cat=16&scat=32&prod=103&sku=TLNT-1102-D00

 

[Philipp Meier]

Thanks! Getting a 10Gb card and 10Gb ethernet switch would be my alternative thought to build the back end. Question: are both the Atto and the three Pegasus connected to the same thunderbolt channel on the Mac mini? That seems like it could create a bottleneck on its on since a thunderbolt channel only has 10gb/s itself.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Your thinking is certainly sound. You may want to compare to something like a Terrablock from Facilis (http://www.facilis.com/t8.html). Cost wise, it's a little bit more (around $7k list price) but then, you shouldn't have to spend any time setting it up and configuring it, and it's guaranteed to work. I don't have any direct experience with Facilis products, but they have a pretty solid reputation.

Using your words, in THEORY your plan works. But if you've never tried it before, and your project is on a tight deadline, and you need something to work ASAP, then going with a Terrablock, or another NAS solution (a call to Synology, as well, to see how many clients their products can support at once and what the throughput is, might be worth your time) could cost you a little more $$$ but make up for it in time (which, we all know, also = $$$).

I'd love to hear what you eventually try, and how it works for you.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Thanks! Getting a 10Gb card and 10Gb ethernet switch would be my alternative thought to build the back end. Question: are both the Atto and the three Pegasus connected to the same thunderbolt channel on the Mac mini? That seems like it could create a bottleneck on its on since a thunderbolt channel only has 10gb/s itself.

You'd be surprised the editing you can get done in HD on lower bandwidth. I recently stopped working in a studio with about 20 connected workstations, and the total accumulated bandwidth (8ish editors, 8ish graphics people, and a few PA types) usually didn't top 3GBs. We were an all ProRes shop with about half the editors working on footage transcoded from Red at any given time. Oh, and all that ProRes was either normal or HQ. We never dipped down to LT or Proxy. [Keep in mind, the 24port switch had either 10GB or 20GB in (I forget if it had one infiniband or two leading in to it), but every port OUT was only 1GB/s. IF you have a standard 1GB/s in splitting to 4 1GB/s out, then at full bore you're limiting the workstations to a theoretical 250MB/s in.]

Unless you know that you are SPECIFICALLY going to be editing something with a bunch of panels and thus 8-10 ProRes streams playing *simultaneously* per timeline, I wouldn't worry too much at anything around 10GB/s for 4 workstations. Our workstations had only 1GB/s ethernet and could play 5 solid 1080p ProRes streams simultaneously. A 6th MIGHT make it hiccup. A 7th would stutter constantly. The only reason I know that is because I specifically tested it. In practice, we never came close to that max.

The only guy that did bump up against a problem on 1GB/s ethernet was our Nuke artist, because he would either be using or exporting 4K DPX or TIFF sequences.

 

[Philipp Meier]

You'd be surprised the editing you can get done in HD on lower bandwidth. I recently stopped working in a studio with about 20 connected workstations, and the total accumulated bandwidth (8ish editors, 8ish graphics people, and a few PA types) usually didn't top 3GBs. We were an all ProRes shop with about half the editors working on footage transcoded from Red at any given time. Oh, and all that ProRes was either normal or HQ. We never dipped down to LT or Proxy. [Keep in mind, the 24port switch had either 10GB or 20GB in (I forget if it had one infiniband or two leading in to it), but every port OUT was only 1GB/s. IF you have a standard 1GB/s in splitting to 4 1GB/s out, then at full bore you're limiting the workstations to a theoretical 250MB/s in.]

Unless you know that you are SPECIFICALLY going to be editing something with a bunch of panels and thus 8-10 ProRes streams playing *simultaneously* per timeline, I wouldn't worry too much at anything around 10GB/s for 4 workstations. Our workstations had only 1GB/s ethernet and could play 5 solid 1080p ProRes streams simultaneously. A 6th MIGHT make it hiccup. A 7th would stutter constantly. The only reason I know that is because I specifically tested it. In practice, we never came close to that max.

The only guy that did bump up against a problem on 1GB/s ethernet was our Nuke artist, because he would either be using or exporting 4K DPX or TIFF sequences.

Interesting, thank you! The iMac's would definitely connect via 1Gb/s ethernet to the switch. But I am contemplating if should go with 5 trunked 1Gb/s ethernet cables to the switch (for a combined 5gb/s) or for $1000 more just get a 10Gb/s card and managed 10Gb/s switch and provide a 10gb/s backbone to the Mac mini server.

My main question is this: if my server is connected via either 5gb or 10gb backbone to the switch and the iMacs themselves are only connected via 1gb/s can they each pull down the full 1gb/s simultaneously or would the total available bandwidth of the switch decrease to 1gb/s since that's the lowest common denominator?

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Interesting, thank you! The iMac's would definitely connect via 1Gb/s ethernet to the switch. But I am contemplating if should go with 5 trunked 1Gb/s ethernet cables to the switch (for a combined 5gb/s) or for $1000 more just get a 10Gb/s card and managed 10Gb/s switch and provide a 10gb/s backbone to the Mac mini server.

My main question is this: if my server is connected via either 5gb or 10gb backbone to the switch and the iMacs themselves are only connected via 1gb/s can they each pull down the full 1gb/s simultaneously or would the total available bandwidth of the switch decrease to 1gb/s since that's the lowest common denominator?

The benefit of going with a 10GB/s switch now is that it will last you longer, and won't need to be replaced as soon. Future-proofing is definitely worth it if you can swing it. But it's also not a necessity for this particular project.

And also, I can't imagine that the output of one cord would limit the input to the switch. That would be silly design. I mean, there could be some cheap-ass switches out there that work that way, but man, what a dumb design if that's true. Again, the switch we had ( a rack mounted 24-port switch) had 10GB/s in and then doled out 1GB/s to 20 different workstations. These workstations were not stealing from each other. I won't say anything silly like "this is how every switch in the world works", but it would be silly to not work this way, for sure.

 

[Philipp Meier]

The benefit of going with a 10GB/s switch now is that it will last you longer, and won't need to be replaced as soon. Future-proofing is definitely worth it if you can swing it. But it's also not a necessity for this particular project.

And also, I can't imagine that the output of one cord would limit the input to the switch. That would be silly design. I mean, there could be some cheap-ass switches out there that work that way, but man, what a dumb design if that's true. Again, the switch we had ( a rack mounted 24-port switch) had 10GB/s in and then doled out 1GB/s to 20 different workstations. These workstations were not stealing from each other. I won't say anything silly like "this is how every switch in the world works", but it would be silly to not work this way, for sure.

Yes that's what I figured. I think I may go with the Netgear XS712T. It's a 12port managed 10Gb/s switch. Less cables and a 10Gb/s backbone for my server. And if any of my imac clients bumb against their 1gb/s limit I can simply purchase a $30 thunderbolt to gigabit ethernet adapter and trunk that together with the internal ethernet for a combined 2gb/s channel per iMac.

This all leads to one more question, however: should I use a the Mac mini as my server or the cheapest iMac? Mac mini would look great in that sonnet enclosure and make one neat little package, however, the Mac mini only has one thunderbolt channel so both the 10gb/s ethernet card and the Pegasus r6 would run off of one 10gb/s connection. The iMac as two dedicated 10gb/s thunderbolt channels so storage and ethernet cards would be on a dedicated line each.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

At that point, maybe you should get a PC desktop, cheap, with PCIe slots. Because you won't need a ton of CPU or GPU power, you'll just need a bit of RAM and some PCIe cards.

Of course, I have way less experience setting up Windows anything, let alone as a server. And even less setting up Linux.

 

[Philipp Meier]

At that point, maybe you should get a PC desktop, cheap, with PCIe slots. Because you won't need a ton of CPU or GPU power, you'll just need a bit of RAM and some PCIe cards.

Of course, I have way less experience setting up Windows anything, let alone as a server. And even less setting up Linux.

Yes that was an option as well. Even thought about a Hackintosh server but I don't want to go there. I think I'd like to stick with stock Apple computers.

Here is a flow chart of the current set-up I have in mind:

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

I don't know that 2 connections into one edit station will double your speed. Usually, you can only mount a device through one connection.

Of course, if you're doing that for finishing, then at that stage, just unplug the Pegasus, walk it over to the finish station, and plug it in directly via Thunderbolt.

 

[Rudy Lehfeldt-Ehlinger]

I dont think that switch supports LACP which is the protocol that you would need to support the link aggregation binds your looking to do. If this is the case you would not benefit from connecting two cables to the switch from any computer.

If this is not the case please let me know how this setup works out for you.

 

[Cassia Lozinski]

Hi Philip-

I'm dying to know... Which setup did you finally end up going with and how is it working out for you?

Thanks!