Shared ZFS video editing storage for MacPro

_Gea

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I made some tests to get answers about questions like

Shared ZFS storage fast enough for a certain video quality
SMB1 vs SMB2
mtu 1500 vs MTU 9000 (Jumboframes)
NVMe vs SSD vs Disks
Raid 0/Mirror vs RaidZ
Single user vs multiple user
Single pool vs multi pools

some fast tests for concept principles
http://napp-it.org/doc/downloads/performance_smb2.pdf
 
Guessing this is OpenZFS since you are on 10.10? I have been using ZFS for a couple years now, started with MacZFS and moved the OpenZFS on Mavericks. I have a pool that is made up of two sets of 5 discs in RAIDZ.

I don't mess with local bandwidth benchmarks, but I consistently get 110MB/s over gigabit with Jumbo frames enabled.

I really like it for my needs as an iTunes server. OSX doesn't handle it 100% perfect, but its like 98% perfect. As opposed to Windows that just flat refuses. And OpenZFS is actually better in that regard then MacZFS was....that one had some glitches.
 
No, this is not local storage but shared NAS/SAN storage with ZFS.

I use about a dozen MacPro with 10 GbE; Adobe CC and Cinema mainly for Animation and Video. Local performance of the MacPros is perfect with > 800 MB/s read and write. While a local ZFS would be a nice to have this is not needed for disks between 256 and 512 GB (capacity is too low).

As many students work on these machines we need to store files on a shared NAS/SAN storage and this is where I want a fast ZFS storage with data security and snaps. For ZFS we use Solaris (where ZFS comes from) or the free Solaris fork OmniOS. My current tests show that on Solaris you can achieve more than 800 MB/S read and over 600 MB/s write performance - at least with OSX 10.10 or 10.11. I found a lot of problems with 10.9 with Jumboframes and SMB2.1.

The above tests are done with Oracle Solaris 11.3 - the current state of the Art ZFS server, SMB 2.1 and Jumboframes as NAS OS. I currently do the same tests with an OmniOS appliance, a free Solaris fork. First test show a 10-20% lower performance. Maybe this can be improved as I use the current OmniOS beta with SMB 2.1 support. I will add results to the pdf.


edit
I have updated the pdf with results from the free OmniOS (currently beta with SMB2)

Main results for 10G Ethernet on OSX 10.11 and Windows 8.1

- OS version and client network driver is very critical for 10G
on some configs or with some driver releases 10G is not faster than 1G (mostly on reads)
- From Windows, performance to Solaris is similar than to OmniOS (at a lower level than with OSX)
- From OSX, SMB2 to Solaris is faster than to OmniOS
- OSX is faster than Windows on SMB2 reads and writes out of the box
SMB2 performance on OSX goes up to > 600 MB/s on writes and > 800 MB/s on reads to Solaris
SMB performance on Windows goes up to > 300 MB/s on writes and > 600 MB/s on reads

This is a quick "out of the box" check with SMB2 and Jumboframes as the only special settings on OSX.
 
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I have done some NFS tests with OSX.
Results were very disappointing as connection was not very stable with 70 MB/s write and 150 MB/s read
but far away from the 600MB/s write and 800 MB/s read with SMB2

As NFS is usually much faster, this seems a problem with OSX 10.11

Another reason:
We use Adobe CC and Cinema in a multiuser and multi platform (OSX+Windows) environment
where we need authentication and authorisation. This is not possible with NFS on a Mac and SMB on Windows.

btw
Why do you talk about translating anything.
SMB is now the default sharing protocol of Apple. They even use their own implementation not SAMBA.
 
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