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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 :)

SAN with read and write speeds great than 1500+ MB/sec

Jeremy Wiles

Jeremy Wiles

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I'm a novice when it comes to SANs, but I've done a lot of reading here. We've been using the Maxx Digital ThunderRAID2 48TB drives for the past year. They've worked great, but our projects are only accessible by one editor. I need two editors to have access and potentially more in the future, so it needs to be scale-able.

What direction should I start heading? And will I get the same speeds that I'm getting from the Maxx drives? I'm currently getting around 1500MBps read and write speeds.
 
Avid Unity is pretty good, but it's not cheap.
 
Quantum Storenex. we have 180TB and up to 8 systems attached.
 
16G Fiber Channel based SANs can get close. We personally have an XSAN/ Stornext SAN in the office and it hums along close to this speed. But this wont be cheap. Costs about $2500 per mac system, and $4000 per windows/ Linux system to get connected to the network, and then you have fiber channel switch(es), at least two metadata controllers (dedicated computers), fiber channel storage subsystem (we use Promise), and a seperate Ethernet based network for metadata. It's a bit of an up front investment (~$40k+).

The big question is if you need 1500 MB/s per station. If not, you could do an 8G network and save a fair bit on upfront components, and then always upgrade as 16G prices come down.

We work with an excellent systems integrator, PM if you want their contact info.
 
Fibre is on it's way out. I'd be looking at 10Gbe with a view of 40Gb infrastructure.
 
Jeremy,

Is Thunderbolt the only option here? When talking SANs the regular IT hardware brands such as HP or Fujitsu etc. are going to be more cost effective than the ones designed to work with specific software packages. Give me a call and I can discuss the details.
 
The bandwidth is the real killer here. 10G-E is going to be the best interface option and you'll need a pretty beefy managed switching solution that can provide multiplex transport and can swallow enough internal data throughput to keep all the connected ports/ workstations up to speed. On an ideal 10G connection, you're looking at about 800MB/s rates, or half of what you're used to. It's functional and may still work in your favor. That 1500MB/s storage system you have will take a pretty big hit if you have multiple users accessing it. Multiplexed 10G can allow for scaling your bandwidth up and is very do-able, it just costs more money. Usually lots of money is the bad part of it. Most of the investment into your SAN infrastructure will be the switching hardware. It's ungodly expensive right now. If you want to serve up 32 10G ports that can be bonded/ multiplexed and you want the switch to be able to maintain 20G I/O with at least 3 or 4 workstations at once, be prepared to pay a heafty price. That's the biggest downfall of the switching hardware out there right now is the internal bandwidth. Prices go up exponentially as the internal bandwidth scales to keep up with ports.

For switching hardware, there's Cisco, HP, and a few other lesser known but good options. I like ATTO and Intel for the 10G-E PCIe cards and there are options for ones with multiple ports to bond for increased bandwidth.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
The bandwidth is the real killer here. 10G-E is going to be the best interface option and you'll need a pretty beefy managed switching solution that can provide multiplex transport and can swallow enough internal data throughput to keep all the connected ports/ workstations up to speed. On an ideal 10G connection, you're looking at about 800MB/s rates, or half of what you're used to. It's functional and may still work in your favor. That 1500MB/s storage system you have will take a pretty big hit if you have multiple users accessing it. Multiplexed 10G can allow for scaling your bandwidth up and is very do-able, it just costs more money. Usually lots of money is the bad part of it. Most of the investment into your SAN infrastructure will be the switching hardware. It's ungodly expensive right now. If you want to serve up 32 10G ports that can be bonded/ multiplexed and you want the switch to be able to maintain 20G I/O with at least 3 or 4 workstations at once, be prepared to pay a heafty price. That's the biggest downfall of the switching hardware out there right now is the internal bandwidth. Prices go up exponentially as the internal bandwidth scales to keep up with ports.

For switching hardware, there's Cisco, HP, and a few other lesser known but good options. I like ATTO and Intel for the 10G-E PCIe cards and there are options for ones with multiple ports to bond for increased bandwidth.
Click to expand...
Excellent info, thanks! I've been real happy with the ATTO products (especially thunderbolt to 10g on the macs).

This may have nothing to do with the OP, but I btw get questions on this area for small shops that see want I do, and want to put EVERYTHING on the SAN. When I get these questions I often find they are not properly setting up their caches for the various programs, and setting up the caches for multi-user use for each program is complex on a SAN. Anyway I always have my caches local per computer (i.e. local SSD/drive which can run around 2 Gbytes per second), this saves me from shooting myself in the foot with weird shared cache issues on the SAN and also get a faster/more_reliable system with just the "normal" 10g switches and such. I am doing this with a 8k DI stereo workflow (so I really doubt when people need faster speeds then I have with non-stereo 4k workflows) but I don't have normally more then two workstations hitting the same files.
 
Yes, local caches, storage and scratch disks are hugely important. It really does not matter how awesome your SAN is. It will break under strain if you try to use it for all of your storage needs on multiple systems.
 
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