Your Dream Server/RAID?!?

Greetings,

Been reading the threads for awhile now and lots of great advice! I did a check on FCP Server or other RAID/Storage systems and kind of came up empty handed.

I work in a small corporate video dept. and we are looking to house hundreds of hours of video/pictures on a server for all of us to access simultaniously. I have some research and found some iffy reviews of FCP Server.....so what would YOUR ideal setup be for the following?!?

We have 2 G5's OSX, with 650gb storage on each. Running FCP 6. The third machine is a G5 OS X running FCP 5.

I'm not to familiar with SATA or ESATA drives so laymans terms would work best. We would create our own network within our department to run the video server.

I look forward to hearing some great advice!

Thanks!!!

Eric

You would need some sort of shared storage for Final Cut Server. This could be an Apple XServe (but it's not really Apple anymore) or any Network Attached storage.

With the newer G5's and MacPro, you have two 1000Mb ethernet ports that you can dedicate on to a NAS (Network Attached Storage). The other more expensive solution is Fiberchannel 4 Gbps and that is really expensive.

My suggestion is NAS and plenty of on-board local SATA storage for each Mac. eSATA is referring to an external SATA storage container that connects to a PCI-X/(e) card to host a smaller RAID system. SATA RAID is really faster than Fiberchannel today whe you have at least 4 drives (stripes).

There's plenty of companies selling NAS storage, so Google away!

Great thanks for your response! Does anyone else have suggestions for shared file systems? Whats the final opinion of FCP Server?!?!

What little I've seen of FCP server looked great. I have heard that you need IT guys to get it set up, but the workflow stuff was definitely on the right path.

For example, you need to 'book out' project in order to work on the, so no one else can work over your work at the same time. However, all media is accessible by all connected parties at all times.

Also it has 'watch' folders that perform automated tasks when things are dropped in them, like making a web version, uploading it, emailing the client to let them know where to review it, and giving them a review text box to approve or reject the cut. Very handy.

What bad things have you heard about FCP server?

I heard that the workflow wasn't very reliable and interfacing it with workstations was difficult. Considering you said that you need IT guys to hook it up would justify that claim.

A slightly different take on your situation. It would be helpful if you told us what your budget is, what amount of storage your looking for and what format you'll be editing -- also define what you mean by "simultaneous access."

I have a system with about 25TB's shared between seven FCP systems. they can all access the media concurrently, however only one FCP system can access (write) one project at a time. This is known as volume level sharing and works very well in an editorial environment. This software/file system is called FiberJet.

The hardware is a RAID with 32 drives which provides something north of 500MB/s which is plenty to edit uncompressed HD attached via 4Gb fiber channel switch.

If you want concurrent file sharing - more than one editor working on the same file at the same time then you should research Xsan or ADIC. However, this is expensive and I don't really see a good return on the additional investment in dollars and IT support.

Our entire system, not including FCP workstations was around $35K. Not that expensive when you consider the amount and performance level of this managed storage. This system keeps our editors working very efficiently.

Another thing to consider, if you use FCP Server to manage your workflow having your media stored on this type of filesystem enables you to work in what Apple refers to as "edit in place." This means that you do not have to render proxy files to edit with. This savea lot of time and disk space and I doubt that you can do that with a NAS system. In fact I'll take it a step further and recommend against using NAS.

Although FCP can work on a NAS system and that some people swear by them FCP was not designed to edit by reading the media via a TCPIP protocol which is what a NAS does. FCP really likes direct attached storage which is how a fiber channel volume appears to it. Also the more drives/volume I add the faster my filesystem operates.

Having a switched fiber channel architecture is much more flexible, scaleable and more cost efficient.

"It would be helpful if you told us what your budget is, what amount of storage your looking for and what format you'll be editing -- also define what you mean by "simultaneous access.""


We are currently in the discovery process....no real budget set in stone, but it would be safe to say that we would spend at least 15K for servers/applications. We currently edit DV, shot on mini-DV. However, there is a strong possibility that we would be upgrading to an HD type format (all depends on managements decision, which include an entire retro-fit of every office around the country...pretty costly) As far as simultaneous access...have at least 10people accessing / sharing files and moving media around.

I really appreciate you time to respond to my post!!! This board is great!

Eric