Need suggestions for sharing drives

Hello,

We are building an editing room with a second system for an assistant. We are getting a 30 TB drive and wondering what is the best way to connect the tower to two systems without having to buy 2 fiber cards. Should we use an ethernet connection? How slow would it be? Can we do it with Esata or mini SAS? I've never really set up a system like this so any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Both systems would need to edit HD footage.

Thanks!

It'd be a lot easier to answer this question if you said what model of RAID you're talking about.

Just to pick a random example, if you buy a 32 TB Promise VTRAK with hot-hot controllers, you can allocate two LUNs and assign each to a separate controller, rather than using the default controller affinity feature. That way you could patch one edit system into each controller directly, giving each a 16 TB filesystem, minus RAID overhead.

But this wouldn't be a very good idea. Each system would have complete, uncontested access to its own filesystem, but no access at all to the other filesystem.

What you really want is Xsan. It's not free, and it's non-trivial to set up, but it works just amazingly, jaw-droppingly well.

Whatever you do, do not patch both workstations into a single LUN and try to mount it read-write. At best, you'll have major data integrity problems; at worst, you'll lose the whole volume.

I know other options exist for shared storage, but not having used any of them myself, I won't express any opinions. Maybe others who have hands-on experience could chime in.

You say that you are "getting" a RAID. Meaning already purchased, or do you have some flexibility as to what system you are going to install?

There are several technologies for shared storage. As Jeff points out building these kinds of systems in non-trivial. X-SAN and Fiber is the most robust and time tested. However, it is not a DYI project, unless you moonlight as an IT engineer.

You mentioned Ethernet. You can use Ethernet solutions, sort of. If you are using low data rate codecs you can edit this way. WAY not recommended tho. Ethernet out of the box is not really designed for smooth continuos delivery of data. Computers compete for use of the bandwidth, which generates continual collisions. Fine for pulling a text file or web page, but the resulting errors can choke editing and capturing with dropped frames.

Several manufactures, however, have designed around the limitations. What they do is connect each edit station to a special switch that isolates it from the other systems, so each thinks it has exclusive access to the network. Even the venerated Avid uses this architecture with some of it's shared storage products.

Others you can look at include Editshare and ProMax:
[www.editshare.com]
[www.promax.com]

I can not personally endorse either of these systems, tho I do have a client who is taking a very serious look at Editshare. Keep in mind that there are limits to the codecs you can work in due to bandwidth limits, and that if you do multi-cam work you may be disappointed in the number of simultaneous streams you can use.

You also mentioned SAS. This product from CalDigit I find very interesting:
[www.caldigit.com]

Again I have not personal experience with the product, but do like their storage systems, as do many here in LAFCPUG. This looks to be VERY fast, but does require installing boards in your workstations.

Finally take a look at the display ads here and on other forum sites. There are a several other manufactures of shared storage devices aimed at our market segment.

-Vance

>what is the best way to connect the tower to two systems without having to buy 2 fiber cards.

Believe me, when it comes to building a SAN, the easiest part is buying the fibre cards, unless as Vance mentioned, you moonlight as an IT engineer. One of the most important part when it comes to SANs is the support. You need to make sure you are able to have on site support.



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Well. To be fair, Xsan is actually quite trivial to set up. It can be done from scratch in a good afternoon, if you've got all the pieces and parts. The tricky part is knowing how to set it up. If you just plug in the computers and storage and install the software, you'll quickly discover that nothing works, because you didn't set up Open Directory (to handle authentication and file access), or because you failed to set up time synchronization, leaving the computers confused about who's got the most up-to-date copy of critical system files.

My general rule of thumb is that setting up your second Xsan should take no more than about four hours. Setting up your first one should take no less than about four weeks.

====> Well. To be fair, Xsan is actually quite trivial to set up
====> Setting up your first one should take no less than about four weeks.

Oh the irony!

Lol. I gotta say, I don't understand SANs too much, I know of a SAN that allows duplicate file names on the same volume. My guess is that the volume is formatted to EXT3 instead of HFS+



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