Shared Storage Recommendations

[Micheal-Green]

I tried calling customer support but they were literally 0 help.

We are a large team currently editing off a server connected to each machine via fiber. It was home built by one of our organization's former IT guys. It just doesn't seem to be up to pace with what we need though. The sequential speed is fine, but the random IO is not, and editing anything that wasn't shot under 100Mbps is a terrible experience. Making proxies just takes way too long as well typically when working with XAVC or C500m2 footage which are the two predominant codecs we have.

I've found a few solutions such as sns products, but I'm curious what other people are using, or if anyone has any recommendations as to what we could be doing differently. For context, we shoot and edit a wide array of different things ranging from music videos to episodic content.

[Kevin-Monahan]

Mr. Tim,

On behalf of Adobe, I am very sorry our support team was unable to help you. Not to make excuses, but we really do not have any kind of in house consulting service for hardware setup in an advanced shared media workflow. We recommend working with a Video VAR that has more experience along these lines.

Editing in a networked environment is a challenge to begin with, even more so with media that has high requirements. I know this as I had the experience of being part of the engineering department at Deluxe in Burbank that had an installation like this from Apple XSAN. It was my job to keep this SAN up and running.

My advice is (and what Deluxe did) is that you bring in a consultant from a VAR to help you tune the system for the kind of media you are working with and the number of users that will be using the system at any one time. That way, you can be sure you have the proper hardware setup with workflows in place so that you do not overload your system's ability to work with x amount of editors at the same time with y flavor of media.

The main reason that I recommend a consultant to work with is that there are way too many variables to a networked media system, especially one that contains fiber which has special considerations and protocols for certain media types. It takes the guess work out of the equation, and as they say, time is money. Unlike other tech, building out a reliable media sharing network, is usually not "plug-in and play." In my experience, it takes quite a bit of set up time and tuning to get it right and to keep it up and running reliably.

Sorry I don't have a simple solution, just some general advice on how my former employer handled a fiber channel based SAN which had the capability to edit ProRes in HD res for about 18 clients in a pro broadcast "Hollywood" enviornment.

I hope the advice helps a little.

Thank You,
Kevin

[Micheal-Green]

That is quite helpful!

Pardon the ignorance, but what does VAR stand for? 🙂

[John T Smith]

VAR = Value Added Reseller

Like going to Jiffy Lube for an oil change instead of driving up on ramps in your driveway to crawl under yourself