On what you need to know before you upgrade your storage

What are some of the latest advancements in your product lines?

We now have the technology in our XStream series [which was shown at IBC 2008 ready for shipment] to put huge numbers of drives together. We can stripe together 64 or 128 or even 256 discs all in one single array. So, what that gives us is an extremely high bandwidth and an extremely high stream count. Our customers are looking for very large numbers of people being able to share the same set of files, whether they’re DI, HD, 2K or more broadcast-geared types of production files.

The other big technology that we’re working on is an all-purpose back up and archiving storage solution that we call Arc, a single unified system to fulfill many different needs of customers. So we have some customers who are looking for a safety back-up. Others are looking for a system that could help them be back up and running again on very short notice, so we’ve developed functionality that maintains a back-up of all the media on your primary server, which, should you ever need it, can turn into a working EditShare. Arc can also serve a cheaper, more energy efficient way to park digital media while a project is on hold. It’s conceived to work with both spinning discs and tapes such as Quantum.

Then we have other customers who are looking for long-term storage. They’re finished with a project and want to be able to get bits and pieces of it in the future without having to re-digitize it all, but they don’t want it to be occupying a lot of space on their highest performing storage. Arc can adapt to all these kinds scenarios.

In the long run we’re designing it to do a near real-time mirroring. So, potentially in a broadcast environment where you might be ingesting 8-10 streams at any one time, we have the technology to maintain a back-up of what you’re ingesting within, say, 30 seconds.

In your experience, are there questions that people should ask before buying storage, but may not consider at the time?

Yes, I can think of a few. One is: how much protected storage are you really getting? Some companies might say, “We’ll sell you an 8 TB system at this price with protected storage.” If you read the sentence closely, it doesn’t mean that you’ll have 8 TB of useable storage with the protection, it’s going to be 4 TB. They said they’d have x number of TB and protected storage or mirroring and they did. So, you really have to look closely at the fine print to be sure of how much storage you’re getting, how much useable storage.

Another question is: what is your true cost of ownership? Some systems are very complex and they involve many different pieces of hardware and software. These may require months of training and studios will end up with a full-time person acting as administrator. So, you have to consider the hidden costs of operation. Is the system going to require manpower or is it easy enough to manage without extensive training?

Also, what is your true stream count? At Editshare, we publish the most pessimistic stream counts because we configure all of our storage as one big block, which means you don’t have to worry about where you put things. It’s true that you can get more streams out of a system if you break it down into two or three or more discrete blocks of storage, and this is how many streaming estimates are calculated. What difference does this make? Well, say if you’re making a documentary with 20 people and you want all 20 users to be working on the same thing.   You may not be able to, because that piece may be located on a discrete block of storage that only allows 5 streams.

What are some basic ways a facility can assess how much bandwidth and space they require?

What we tend to tell our customers is that they need to help us to help them. We ask how many workstations are going to be working simultaneously; what are the video resolutions you’re going to be working at; how many streams per workstation; how many workstations are likely to be doing multi-stream effects at exactly the same time. You come up with a reasonable estimate of how many streams you’re likely to be using at any one time and then leave a little margin for error. And then you need to look at how much storage you use too. If you’re in an environment where it’s going to take you a long time to decide what to throw out, then you need more storage because you don’t delete what you’re finished with. Generally, the more discs, the more streams, the more storage.

Why do you prefer Ethernet to Fibre Channel connectivity?

The fundamental fact is whether you have Fibre Channel or Ethernet, data travels from point A to point B at the speed of light. So, if what you need is to look at a data stream that’s 20 Mbps, it’s not going to be any faster through Fibre Channel. The same applies to 40 Mbps and 60 Mbps. Once you get to 60 Mbps, you’re talking about meeting the needs of most of the people who are out there editing: 2 or 3 streams of Pro-res or DNX HD or many streams of DV50 or DV60. When you get to uncompressed HD, that’s a different thing, and that’s where we have 10 GB Ethernet.

Now, Ethernet has a slightly higher overhead on a processor or workstation, so you might need a slightly more powerful workstation to work over Ethernet. But, that said, most any workstation you can buy today will work perfectly fine. You may see it read slightly higher on your CPU counter, but so what? It’s not having any impact on your experience.

The advantage of Ethernet is that, because it’s on every laptop and workstation, it makes it easy to bring others to the party. People with Fibre Channel have to think twice about every workstation they add to the system because of the infrastructure costs. The new 4 gigabit or 8 gigabit fiber channel are powerful, but you can pump more data over 10 gigabit Ethernet than 8 GB fiber channel, and we’re going to have 20 and 40 gigabit Ethernet soon.

How important is it to buy storage elements and accessories from the same company?

The answer to that question depends on what company you’re buying it from. I can answer that question for us. We give pretty reasonable prices on all accessories, connectors, routers, switchers, etc. and we only sell a limited number of models and we know how they work. So we set them up before they go out of here so if there are features that need to be enabled or disabled, we do it. If customers buy outside a equipment and we’re not familiar with that particular model, it can make it harder for us to troubleshoot any problems. We can’t devote as much time to learning a whole new router or switch we provide something very economical that we can guarantee does the job.

Overall, we attempt to make our system as open as we can, so that it works with everything, so there are very few limitations.