Lan storage for working on the same project

[xor2]

Hello,

I would like to ask You if anyone of you tried to use lan storage with connected discs and to use it for work on several computers at the same time.

Do you know the configuration which would handle such data read operations?
The storage manufacture, disc configuration, etc ...?

Thans for posts in advance

[4Kover3D]

Take 12 drives, put into some tower case, use good RAID controller (eg Areca) with RAID 5. Put eg 8 port gigabit card and connect each workstation through dedicated 1gbit connection. Simple, easy to do and cheap solution. Allows to work with HD files using HQ codec- even few layers.
Other solutions will be 10gbit ethernet, fibre with some SAN softwar, but this is complicated and cost are few x higher.

You can look at DDP solutions:

http://www.dynamicdrivepool.com/

If you can afford than it's good solution.

[antonsvideo]

Hello,

I would like to ask You if anyone of you tried to use lan storage with connected discs and to use it for work on several computers at the same time.

Do you know the configuration which would handle such data read operations?
The storage manufacture, disc configuration, etc ...?

Thans for posts in advance

if all networked computers are working on the same project at the same time, how will the work be saved? I would say that only the first to open can save and the others are in read only mode, so whatever they do will be pointless?

unless I am missing the point

[4Kover3D]

if all networked computers are working on the same project at the same time, how will the work be saved? I would say that only the first to open can save and the others are in read only mode, so whatever they do will be pointless?

unless I am missing the point

Yes- but you can always save with different name. It can be done, bit not sure if I like idea.

[SoundFreak_HD]

Yes- but you can always save with different name. It can be done, bit not sure if I like idea.

This way you'll need to schedule time for a group meeting to discus who is working on what sequence, if not, it will be become one big mess with many versions :)

[Raja]

Unless I'm missing the point, I dont think he means working off the same project but just a central storage of files for different projects.

I have 4 to 5 local hard drives with different drive letters on each of the 3 edit stations across a gigabit lan.
These are all shared and mapped across each workstation. Each drive letter is unique but sitting on PC1, for example, drive G is mapped to the local drive G on PC2.
This way you can open any project from any of the PCs and the files could be located anywhere. Works great for HD.
NAS's are too slow. The fastest is probably QNAP according to the specs but I have not tested it.

[gazzar]

Hello,

I would like to ask You if anyone of you tried to use lan storage with connected discs and to use it for work on several computers at the same time.

Do you know the configuration which would handle such data read operations?
The storage manufacture, disc configuration, etc ...?

Thans for posts in advance

I Have 7 Edius Workstations and 2 FCPs all connected to a central high performace RAID6 NAS using GBit ethernet only...the NAS is used to centrally store and serve MEDIA files and all projects are created on local workstation drives. Projects are backed up to NAS nightly. This makes the NAS mainly deal with READ operation and the READ/WRITES happen locally. As the project folders stay releatively small without the MEDIA being stored in them, i've been toying with the idea of using SSD's for local project folders. All the drive mapping on all the Edius Workstations are identical, and this makes moving projects around workstations easy. Editors dont really work on same project at the same time, but do work on different versions of the overall project content. This all seems to work well. Have a smaller portable version of this same setup to do field editing with 4 workstations. Looks very simialar to GV's Workgroup Server Offering.

It is also important to remember, that hard drives are not the only thing that can fail on a NAS box, so keep spares of everthing and do your backups . RAID6 will help protect your data on the drives, but if the RAID card goes down, then you cant get at your data.

[xor2]

Thank you for the answer.

Could You please tell me if you have some specification of the equipment, model version, price, etc that I could take a look in the internet?
Or Could you just make a list of all necessary assemblies?

Thank You

I Have 7 Edius Workstations and 2 FCPs all connected to a central high performace RAID6 NAS using GBit ethernet only...the NAS is used to centrally store and serve MEDIA files and all projects are created on local workstation drives. Projects are backed up to NAS nightly. This makes the NAS mainly deal with READ operation and the READ/WRITES happen locally. As the project folders stay releatively small without the MEDIA being stored in them, i've been toying with the idea of using SSD's for local project folders. All the drive mapping on all the Edius Workstations are identical, and this makes moving projects around workstations easy. Editors dont really work on same project at the same time, but do work on different versions of the overall project content. This all seems to work well. Have a smaller portable version of this same setup to do field editing with 4 workstations. Looks very simialar to GV's Workgroup Server Offering.

It is also important to remember, that hard drives are not the only thing that can fail on a NAS box, so keep spares of everthing and do your backups . RAID6 will help protect your data on the drives, but if the RAID card goes down, then you cant get at your data.

[gazzar]

Thank you for the answer.

Could You please tell me if you have some specification of the equipment, model version, price, etc that I could take a look in the internet?
Or Could you just make a list of all necessary assemblies?

Thank You

I dont mind giving you a full spec and ballpark costings for the sytems i installed, but as it is not specifically GV Edius related i ask you to PM me.

[dash144]

We just installed a "home made" NAS for 5 of our work stations. We have i7 3770 , ASrock z77 extreme 6 board, ddr3 8G ram, intel 520 120G SSD, Areca 1882ix-24 raid card, we first started with 8 3tb SATA drives on Raid 5 to test. We have 10gb network out of the NAS box, and 1gb for all the work stations. It's smooth when we try to edit with it, but when we try to reopen the project, it takes double of the time to open it than open on the local work station, and the more people edit on the nas the slower for the project to open. Is there any thing or setting we missed? How can we improve the performance? We run windows 2008 sever R2 on the NAS.