Cost-effective, shared storage for Mac?

July 4, 2006 11:41 AM

Cost effective, shared storage for Mac?

I work for a small production company that uses two G5s to edit video. We want both machines to share a large central drive (a RAID, I suppose). What's the best way to go about this? I looked into Xsan, but that appears to be out of our price range. Are there more cost effective alternatives?

posted by brundlefly to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

(first of all, sorry for throwing all sorts of abbreviations and techno lingo around. I hope I can point you in the right direction nonetheless.)

If a SAN is too expensive for you, but you still want shared storage and some drive failure protection (like a RAID 1 or RAID 5 setup), you probably are looking for some sort of NAS device.

NAS = network attached storage, and comes in many ways and price ranges. Key difference between SANs and NAS is that -usually- SAN is fiber based, meaning expensive adapters and switches, while NAS devices use standard ethernet cabling.

Of course, the price difference comes with a performance difference as well. Best performance will probably come from a device that supports iSCSI, combined with an ethernet adapter with TOE (TCP offload engine).

Without a budget reference it's hard to give you a more detailed answer.

Generally speaking:

low price ---------------------- high performance
NAS------NAS with iSCSI -------SAN
posted by lodev at 11:55 AM on July 4, 2006

Off of the top of my head, you should give the following places a call:

Promax. They sell integrated solutions
TekServ. Same sorta thing, in NYC
I haven't done business with, but I heard of theDrgroup

All three of which are Apple Video Specialists.

And also, Roarke Data. They have a san solution, which I've linked to.

There used to be a cheap SAN cube (firewire based), but I don't think it made it over to OSX.
posted by filmgeek at 1:18 PM on July 4, 2006

If XSan is too expensive, I would guess you're out of luck. For video, XServeRaid + XSan is almost certainly your best value for cost and performance.

That said... Do you need simultaneous access to the media? Is it a huge volume of media that is motiviating this, or do you need the shared storage? How fast does access need to be? Is this for DV, SD, HDV? For anything better than low-rez video (DV or compressed SD), I wouldn't think you could get away with NAS.

You may be at a painful size, where there is so much media that simply duplicating to local work drive is too time-intensive, but you don't have the business to support a 10K investment in new hardware and software to facilitate a fibre-based shared storage.
posted by mzurer at 1:34 PM on July 4, 2006

Pick up one of these babies and you'll be set.
posted by evariste at 1:51 PM on July 4, 2006

Response by poster: We're working with DV. The main thing right now is shared access, although we'll be picking up a number of new clients soon, so we may be dealing with a lot of media in the near future. As far as our budget, that's really kind of up in the air. I just know that I presented my bosses with pricing info on Xsan and they visibly flinched, then asked me to find some alternatives.

Thanks for all the info so far, guys. This is very helpful.
posted by brundlefly at 2:26 PM on July 4, 2006

If you're working with DV--which extremely low datarate requirements--you would be amazed at how well a simple, low-tech, Gigabit Ethernet setup performs.

Our studio found this out by accident one day (we have an editing facility running four G5 based FCP workstations) when my offline editor copied his FCP project file over to another system in our studio and opened it, not realizing that the project was actually pointing to the original media files over the network on HIS system, rather than the local, external SATA array. He did a fully client supervised edit all day long that way, and didn't even notice that he was pulling the media over the GigE network.

Just for fun, I tried working on an uncompressed SD project this way, and to my surprise, it worked just as well. Although I wouldn't want to depend on it if you had 3 or 4 editors trying to access the same media at the same time.
posted by melorama at 6:35 PM on July 4, 2006