Hi everyone-

I am curious about unsupported storage configurations.  At our facility we have a 300TB and growing SAN volume that I need to get our DS' connected to.  I know enough about our SAN to use it, but not enough to understand connections to it, or the type of SAN it is, so I rely heavily on our IT guys who run the SAN.  What I do know is that it is an xSAN and we connect to it from Apple Mac Pro's using dual 4GB fiber connections.

I want to connect to the SAN from our DS' using a fiber connection.  My plan would be to create a folder for each DS on the SAN volume and setup that folder as an indexed storage folder (to avoid the DS' indexing the entire volume).  I tried this out using a Mac running Windows Vista and DS software and was able to get playback from a 2K file - so I know it can work (at least a little) - but our DS' apparently do not have the necessary slots available to add a fiber card.

The DS' we have are: 3 XW8000 v8.4, XW8200 v10.3, XW9300 v10.3 and XW8400 v10.3.

My questions are:

If I upgraded our hardware to Z800 systems, would I have the necessary slots available to add a fiber card?

What fiber card would this be (if any of you have any experience with this)?

Would setting up multiple folders on the SAN as indexed folders for each DS work?

Also I know this would be unsupported, but the reality of my situation is the FCP stations at my facility are growing due to their ability to connect to this storage, and I need the DS' to be able to do this to justify hardware upgrades.

Thanks for any help-

Brian

Brian,

One issue/risk is that DS detects and lists the supported adapters in its storage configuration (Media Indexer) and we have no certainty that the fiber card that you pick and the SAN will be listed.  If they are not, then the media cannot be real-time.

The only Avid approved fiber card for the Z800 is the Atto FC-41ES for PCI-E (XS for PCI-X). If you must use another card, it might not work.

You obtained some working results with Avid DS Software because this is designed to work without hardware and so "Generic" is a valid option, but NOT for the fully equipped DS hardware workstation.

Ok thanks Sylvain.  For the record the software station I was on detected the ATTO card installed in the machine accurately as our FC-42ES card.

So in theory putting 4 folders on a SAN volume that are each indexed by a different DS should work?  That would be a very exciting possibility for us, and would probably allow me to upgrade our old machines to Z800's.

Again, I know this isnt supported and I would never hold Avid accountable.  I have local storage array's for each system purchased from Avid, it would just be best case scenario if I could work off of our existing shared storage setup.

Thanks again as always-

Brian

Brian_Holter:

For the record the software station I was on detected the ATTO card installed in the machine accurately as our FC-42ES card.

Yes, but the FC-42ES is not qualified for an hardware equipped Avid DS workstation.  We tolerate more for DS Software...

Brian_Holter:

So in theory putting 4 folders on a SAN volume that are each indexed by a different DS should work?  That would be a very exciting possibility for us, and would probably allow me to upgrade our old machines to Z800's.

Yes, that will work.

Great!

Thank you Sylvain.

Just a quick follow up to this, im hopeful someone out there knows more about this stuff than I do.

I have a z800 system here at my facility now and I am attempting to configure it as described above.  Everything seemed to go smoothly on the install but when I attempted to capture 1080p 23.98 uncompressed material to our SAN I ran into dropped frames.  I captured around 7 seconds before it dropped.  I then tested NTSC and everything went great.  Because the HD didnt work i assumed it was a throughput problem with the SAN.

To test this i ran a speed test that reported back the speed that data could be written to the SAN and read from the SAN on this system.  I also tested it on a different computer connected to the same SAN via this fiber card.  For good measure i also ran the test on our xw9300 with local storage.  Here is the result:

z800 Fiber to SAN

• Read - 94mb/s
  
• Write - 88 mb/s
  

xw9300 SCSI to Local

• Read - 360 mb/s
  
• Write - 293 mb/s

PC Fiber to SAN

• Read - 290 mb/s
  
• Write - 270 mb/s
  

So for some reason i am unable to open the pipe between this z800 and the SAN like we have on other machines.  Does anyone know of anything that could be restricting this pipe?  The test run was at a windows level, so it shouldnt have anything to do with DS, right?

Thanks-

Brian

Brian_Holter:

z800 Fiber to SAN

• Read - 94mb/s
  
• Write - 88 mb/s
  

  The test run was at a windows level, so it shouldnt have anything to do with DS, right?

These Read and Write results are much too low to capture HD material.  SD would probably work, though.  And you are correct that this has nothing to do with the DS application.  There is a bottleneck with your hardware and there is certainly a setting to be done with your fiber card hardware.

Are you using a 41 or a 42 ATTO card?  I told you that the 42 type was rejected with DS because of inadequate performance results.

Sylvain-

I know these results are too low.  I didnt check them before I launched DS, i only checked them after my captures failed because it seemed obvious that the disks couldnt keep up with the material.

I dont understand what type of setting I need to look at in the fiber card to open up this bandwidth?  Thats what I am trying to figure out.  Is there a specific slot that this card should be installed into?  The card positions used to have specific setups in the BIOS menu for the Nitris cards, do i need to setup one of these slots to a specific setup to perform adequately?  And yes I know that the 42ES card is not qualified, but its all I have right now.  Not to mention this card should be seeing a larger pipe at the windows level, dealing with issues inside of DS once i see that throughput is another story altogether.  Seeing as I am just trying to demo this system I cant really justify spending the money on a card that isnt a typical card used in our facility.  Every other machine we have here connects to the SAN via a 42ES card.  At this point I am not going to open DS on the machine until i can get throughput readings that are comparable to my other systems.

I will also contact HP support on this (if i can) to see what they have to contribute, i was just hoping that someone on the DS group would have some insight that could help me out first.

Thanks-

The Atto card used for DS in the HP Z800 inserts in PCI-express 4:

http://aviddssupport.avid.com/index.htm?&section=drivers/v10.x/hp_z800

But we have no document or special settings for the card or the slot.

Do you have the Atto FC-42ES documentation?  Maybe you can find something useful in there.