VFCPUG Online

I’ve been somewhat preoccupied this week playing with the edit suite set-up at school. We introduced a system built around Xsan last fall and initially deployed 5 workstations while the fibre installation was being completed. By the time the graduating students really hit crunch time in late March we’d expanded that number to 8. This year we’ll bring our last system—a dedicated ingest station—online.

We’ve also inherited a second, fully-loaded Xserve RAID that we’d originally acquired for another purpose elsewhere within the school. All this has meant we’ve been able to rethink our media storage strategy and network topology for the coming semester.

Each Power Mac G5 system, running FCS 5.1 and (now) Xsan 1.4, is connected via dual 2 Gbit fibre to 2 inter-linked 20-port QLogic SANbox switches, and ultimately the 2 Xserve RAID units. We’ve attempted to configure the “storage pools” to provide the optimum balance between performance and parity. On one controller, Metadata (yellow in the illustration above) is stored across 2 drives, using RAID 1, video render files (red) occupy 3 drives, using RAID 5, while audio render files (green) use the 2 remaining drives and RAID 1. Captured media files (blue) are stored across the remaining 3 controllers, using 6 drives from each set at RAID 5. The remaining drives are designated “hot spares”, to be utilised in the event of complete drive failure.*

All of this is managed using 2 Xserve G5 systems (1 for failover), with a third used for network authentication.

I was interested to note at the Apple/Sony event on Wednesday, that this configuration puts the edit facility at Emily Carr Institute somewhere between the in-house facilities of Karl Lagerfeld and CNN.

*After a brief chat with Xsan Überguru, Matt Geller, we may rethink the configuration to include a hot spare on the first RAID controller. The majority of the projects we undertake involve DV25, which means we could survive without a separate video render pool, but I have questions about flexibility I need to follow-up on… To be continued…