Need a storage solution recommendation for a friend's company

mikesm

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 2, 2005
Messages
178
Hi. A friend of mine works for a company that does a bunch of online production. Right now, their storage solution is a bit of a shambles, and they asked me for some advice. (It's not a porn company :)).

They need to have about 32 TB of online to nearline storage for videos that have already been processed and/or encoded to H.264. They were storing all this on bunches of external hard drives and lost one, which meant they had to go back to tape and redit etc... So bulk storage is important. They'd also like to support backup to LTO tapes for offsite storage.

Additionally, they would like another 10 TB of space or so that is optimized for performance for video editting, and eventually used for servers to transcode things into production formats.


This doesn't sound that hard to me - you use a quad core server with a few SAS connections to supermicro E1 or E2 storage chassis and go from there with windows 2008R2 and hardware raid, or maybe a nexenta solution for ZFS. Some of the volumes would be configured for the archiving task, and others for performance for editing.

The problem is they use all Apple workstations and final cut for their video editing, which means the solution needs to support very high speed file transfers to Macs. They don't to support a lot of this, maybe 2 or 3 workstations editing at once.

All the vendors they go to basically specify xserve servers and ATTO (?) RAID controllers, with SAS expander enclosures that house 16 SATA disks. I'd never heard of ATTO before, and none the quotes from any of the Apple OEM vendors use professional high density storage enclosures that house 24 drives etc... And the prices are REALLY jacked up, even if you use a NAS configuration instead of fiber channel as all of the Apple vendors recommend.

What all would you guys recommend? They don't really want to assemble a solution themselves, but would like to buy one from an OEM, and want to be able to add their won disks and expand the arrays etc...

Thanks,
mike
 
Your friend does not need Xserver

Look at iSCSI system solution

Duad Gb will get you about 190MB/sec, so 2 or 3 stations editing at once are OK
 
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you can ask your friend to check out CineRAID Systems. Its an Areca powered solution for Mac and video environement. Its also more cost effective compare to other vendors.

The Xserve and anything along that line has prices all pretty jacked up not on the hardware but for the service and seat license. I'd assume your friend will not want to think about anything about building or setting up the network configuration....etc. But I do agree the price is still too hefty for the service. They charge it because they can. :D
 
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