Storage Solutionsmlv3

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Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:58 AM Page 1 EXTREME STORAGE Cutting-edge digital storage for demanding, media-rich digital content creation. By Claudia Kienzle T oday’s high-end post production workstations promise unlimited creative freedom for visual effects, compositing, 3D animation, HD mastering and digital intermediates. But, while artists can shoot for the moon creatively, they can easily hit a ceiling if their storage systems aren’t up to the task. The cost, speed and capacity of storage solutions can dictate the resolution levels, numbers of video streams, and scale of any post project. As the industry moves from standard definition (SD) to high definition (HD), and to 2K and 4K near-film resolutions, your storage system must be prepared to handle massive video files — where a single frame can consist of 12MB of data. Multiply that by all the frames in a 60-minute HDTV show or 90minute film, and we’re talking about “extreme storage,” making highend post production one of the most demanding storage applications there is. The following can help you find the best storage for your work. And check out our glossery of storage terms on page 16. DataDirect’s 9500 provides 3.2GBps and six concurrent 2K streams or two concurrent 4K streams in realtime. STORAGE SOLUTIONS • S-1 Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 2 Storage Solutions Fantastic Four Images TM & (C) 2005 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved. BlueArc storage systems were used by Giant Killer Robots while creating this scene from the Fantastic Four. High Performance BLUEARC BlueArc’s Titan 2100 and Titan 2200 network storage systems should be thought of as storage optimizers or storage and throughput managers that work seamlessly with a variety of storage types, such as SATA, RAID, Fibre Channel and even tape back-up systems. For high-end, CG-intensive motion pictures like the Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was completed on a Titan at Rhythm & Hues, that means storage and throughput can be dynamically configured for each stage of the process. During the end of a production crunch, for example, its virtual server can be increased to four Ethernet ports instead of two. Maximum system throughput is 10Gbps. It can handle approximately 100 video streams at 50Mbps up to a total of 5400Mbs. S-2 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS “Titan consolidates and manages up to 512TB of data in a single storage pool,” says Ron Totah, director of technical marketing for BluArc (www.bluearc.com) in San Jose, CA. Any number of file systems can be contained under a single unified directory structure while the physical files are on many different discs. So the users always go to same directory to find the file, even if it’s been moved many times to optimize the storage. “As user requirements scale with many larger HD projects, Titan can be certified with even more capacity well into the Petabyte range, providing headroom to meet any post production project,” says Totah. Titan has the ease of use, management and standards-based access of a NAS, with the scalability and performance of a SAN, without the need to build a separate Fibre Channel network using costly host bus adapters. CIPRICO “As post houses migrate to HD and film resolutions, the reality is that they need to handle data at very high speeds capable of recording and play back of up to 4K film resolution video,” says Mike Anderson, chief engineer of Ciprico (www.ciprico.com) in Agoura Hills, CA. “And as they build out their facilities to work with film material, they’re going to need to interconnect multiple suites with their storage systems,” he adds. “InfiniBand [IB] offers a unique solution to that problem that streamlines network infrastructure and holds down costs.” With 4Gb Fibre Channel, connecting four film processing suites with four storage systems could require 32 ports of a Fibre Channel switch, at the cost of about $50,000 per switch. “But with IB, the same configuration would only require eight links on an IB Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 4 Storage Solutions Ciprico is at this year’s NAB with its Media Vault Bridge that can bridge between Fibre Channel storage and 20Gb IB storage. switch, which could be purchased for well under $10,000,” reports Anderson. “And IB installations are easier to manage because there are one-quarter the number of links that could be a point of failure.” At NAB, Ciprico will show the Media Vault Bridge that can bridge between Fibre Channel storage and 20Gb IB storage, enabling customers to build forward using IB for cost savings. Ciprico will also show the MediaVault 4440, a portable 4Gb solution containing 40 2.5-inch disk drives. Ciprico provides storage to several vendors of high-performance film processing solutions, including Nucoda, Iridas and Assimilate. DATADIRECT NETWORKS “If the engine doesn’t go fast, the car can’t go fast,” explains Bob Woolery, VP product marketing for DataDirect Networks (www.datadirectnet.com) in Chatsworth, CA. “So you can buy an expensive, high-end workstation, but if you don’t have a high-performance storage solution supporting it, it’s not going to deliver the desired degree of artistry. “Storage plays a huge role in determining what work can be done for a given budget,” he adds. “As HD mastering becomes more prevalent, storage issues challenging the high-end are ripS-4 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS pling through to mid-range and smaller post houses.” DataDirect offers two “Silicon Storage Appliances” targeting different price performance thresholds in the market: the S2A-9500, which can deliver 3.2GBps (2.8 GBps sustained) and six concurrent 2K streams or two concurrent 4K streams in realtime; and the S2A-8500, which can deliver 1.5GBps, sufficient to support three concurrent streams of 2K resolution video and priced for the mid-range market. “Our storage solutions offer breakthrough speed and performance in a compact footprint,” says Woolery. “These factors promote higher productivity and cost efficiency that helps our systems to pay for themselves quickly. DataDirect is ‘technology agnostic,’ supporting Fibre Channel [FC] and InfiniBand networking; and Fibre Channel, SATA II and SAS drives.” While Fibre Channel drives have a high MTBF (Mean Time before Failure) rate, making them ideal for very high-end applications, new SATA II drives offer lower cost and more compact technology that can be an attractive alternative, especially with sufficient data protection. “With its lower MTBF rate, SATA II drives have a higher probability of failure,” explains Woolery. “We compensate for this risk by offering hardware-based RAID-6, which dedicates two parity drives to reconstructing the data that resided on two drives, should they fail simultaneously. Since this RAID level is hardware-based, users don’t take a performance hit to use it. Also, design features, such as our S2A controller or appliance head enables storage subsystems to hold 960 SATA II drives [or 480TB of data] in just two rack units.” Bob Woolery says DataDirect products are “technology agnostic.” Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM EMC The EMC Celerra Multi-Path File System software over iSCSI (MPFSi) targets large file, high-bandwidth collaborative applications, such as HD and animation. Celerra MPFSi allows applications to access a shared storage file system via Internet SCSI. “Applications that benefit the most from the technology are highly parallel, highly sequential and/or have large record sizes,” says Mark Greenlaw, director of NAS marketing at EMC Corporation (www.emc.com) in Hopkinton, MA. “Customers have achieved up to four times the read performance over standard NFS data access and more than two times write performance.” EMC Celerra MPFSi offers RAID-1, RAID-1/0, RAID3 and RAID-5, and allows customers to use tiered storage with Fibre Channel, low-cost FC and ATA. It delivers the performance characteristics of iSCSI with the simplicity of NAS file management. It is both a high-performance and shared storage solution. EMC also offers the EMC Clariion and EMC Symmetrix networked storage platforms. GLOBALSTOR Globalstor Data Corp. (www.globalstor. com) in Chatsworth, CA, offers the ExtremeStor-DI, which president/CTO Scott Leif describes as “digital intermediate 2K and 4K realtime uncompressed playback servers designed for applications such as realtime color correction, editing, 3D animation, dailies and playback.” With the ability to capture and color correct realtime uncompressed 2K or 4K content, productivity is maximized without having to work in low-res proxies, reports Leif. Throughput is up to 1500MBps. Solutions offering virtually unlimited scalability are available for SATA II, SAS, Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel using RAID-0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5 and 10. Another ExtremeStor product is the Page 5 ExtremeStor-iNAS, a turnkey NAS solution that provides shared storage for all types of files, including video content. It scales from 3TB to 18TB of raw internal storage and supports many RAID levels up to RAID-10. “With our integrated dual Gig-E ports,” Leif says, “we can provide hundreds of MBps of content delivery to users on a network, and to issue blocks of storage via iSCSI to other computers on a networks.” chip with RAID-0 [striping] built-in so the user doesn’t have to bother with disk-striping utilities.” IQSTOR The new iQ2880 4Gb Fibre Channel storage system from iQstor (www.iqstor. com) targets high-end digital intermediate, HD, digital film and rich media applications that require 24/7 availability and reliability. It incorporates four embedded Glyph’s GT 060BR, with two FireWire 800 ports, offers sustained transfer rates of up to 84MBps, making it suitable for video capture, editing, audio production and mass storage. GLYPH Glyph offers the GT 060BR, a FireWire 800 hardware-based RAID-0 storage solution that is available in 320GB, 500GB, 800GB and ITB capacities. With two FireWire 800 ports, Glyph’s GT 060BR offers sustained transfer rates of up to 84MBps, making it ideal for video capture, editing, audio production and mass storage. It supports compressed and uncompressed video resolutions, including DV, HDV, DVCPRO and 8-bit and 10-bit uncompressed SD, as well as multiple streams when using DV, HDV and DVCPRO formats. “With up to 1TB of capacity in a scalable, portable package, the GT 060BR allows videographers to have a large space to capture, edit and store their projects, whether they’re working in a studio or on the road,” says Peter Glanville, director of marketing, for Glyph Technologies (www.glyphtech.com) in Ithaca, NY. “The product utilizes the Oxford 912 hardware accelerators for increased performance while deploying many RAID levels, including RAID-6. Each iQ2880 supports up to 15 4Gb Fibre Channel drives providing 2.2TB of storage capacity using 146GB disk drives. It can scale up to 35TB with 240 146GB FC drives or 120TB with 240 500GB SATA II drives. It’s possible to achieve over 100TB by attaching J2880 FC/SATA disk enclosures to the iQ2880 storage system to create a tiered-storage environment with Fibre Channel drives providing primary storage and SATA drives for secondary storage. “The IQ2880 is easy to manage, install, configure and support, thus reducing the storage management/administrator overhead and saving customers additional expenses,” says Albert Saraie, director of marketing for iQstor Networks in Newbury Park, CA. “With four 4Gb FC host ports, the iQ2880 has an overall transfer speed of 1600MBps, which is sufficient STORAGE SOLUTIONS • S-5 Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 6 Storage Solutions for uncompressed HD and DI work.” The iQ2880 is undergoing alpha/beta testing and is being introduced at NAB. ISILON “With our new OneFS 4.0 distributed file system, Isilon is ushering in TrueScale technology, providing tailored, ‘pay as you grow,’ storage solutions fully optimized to meet businesses’ unique performance and capacity needs while dramatically reducing costs,” says Brett Goodwin, VP of marketing and communications for Seattle’s Isilon Systems (www.isilon.com). “Our Isilon IQ with One FS 4.0 shatters existing enterprise capacity and performance limitations by achieving 528TB of capacity and 7GBps of performance in a single file system and symmetric cluster,” Goodwin adds. Isilon implements InfiniBand in its clustered storage solution, including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 4800 and 6000 products, which contributes to a concurrent throughput that is 10 times greater than traditional storage systems. The Isilon IQ’s OneFX 4.0, which provides the intelligence behind the Isilon IQ, combines three layers of storage architectures, including the file system, volume manager and advanced RAID capability called FlexProtect-AP, which ensures that all data remains intact even in the unlikely event of multiple component failures. Isilon IQ’s OneFX 4.0 provides access to massive stores of unstructured and file-based information, making it well suited for data-intensive tasks such as digital film, 3D animation and DI work. The Isilon product line also includes the Isilon IQ Accelerator extension node, designed to enable higher performance. Powered by the Isilon’s OneFS distributed file system, Isilon IQ Accelerator nodes can be seamlessly added to Isilon IQ storage clusters using IB networking to scale aggregate throughput to more than 7GBps. MAXIMUM THROUGHPUT Montreal-based Maximum Throughput (www.max-t.com) offers Sledgehammer HD!O, which is both an extremely fast Isilon IQ Accelorator nodes can be added to Isilon IQ storage clusters using IB networking to scale aggregate throughput to more than 70GBps. S-6 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS network-attached file (NAS) server and a multi-format video device that can handle the playback or recording of up to 2K 10-bit log images in realtime. It can digitize, play back and record uncompressed video in realtime in any format, at any resolution — from NTSC up to 2K — and any bit depth in user-selectable, industrystandard file formats. “Incorporating both data and video functions in a single system makes it simple for you to access your images and audio as either data or video,” says CEO Giovanni Tagliamonti. “The flexibility provided in Sledgehammer HD!O, by having both data and video served from the same system, reduces facility wide storage requirements, simplifies workflows and reduces network load by minimizing unnecessary transfer of image data and offloading most image processing tasks onto the server itself.” All Sledgehammer systems — HD!O, SD!O or NAS — can deliver in excess of 300MBps of sustained throughput over a Gigabit Ethernet network and support any type of network client, regardless of the OS (UNIX, Windows, Mac, Linux) with no limit to the number of network clients and no client-side software. The RAID-5 system supports up to 32TB of storage in two 16TB file systems. Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 7 10Gb NAS with a lot of SAS... Rorke Data & Fujitsu deliver cost-effective multi-user, multi-stream NAS storage solutions Today’s dynamic Digital Media networks typically demand ultrafast node-to-node interconnections to support a high bandwidth of data transfer. That’s why Rorke Data has partnered with Fujitsu. We integrate Rorke’s Galaxy series of high-performance, scalable NAS solutions with a blazing combination of Fujitsu XG series 10 Gbit switch infrastructure and Fujitsu’s MAX series 3.5," 15K rpm SAS drives. Cost-effective 10Gb connectivity, the unparallel performance of SAS drives, with Rorke’s service and support – It’s revolutionary disk storage, without the spin. Maximum Throughput’s Sledgehammer products deliver in excess of 300MBps of sustained throughput over a Gig-E network. MAXTOR Maxtor offers the Maxtor OneTouch III Turbo Edition, including the T01W006 (600GB) and T01W010 (1TB) models, targeted to creative professionals. ”When set on RAID-0 striping, which uses both 500GB hard drives at once for highperformance applications like video editing, it allows editors to stream and edit up to seven high-resolution digital video streams at once,” says Ben Castro, senior product marketing manager for Maxtor Corporation (www.maxtor.com) in Milpitas, CA. It also offers easy storage management features and a sustained data transfer rate of 91MBps using the FireWire 800 interface. Galaxy NAS Capacity: 2TB to 12TB* Drives: SAS-based over 1GB/s RAID: Level 3, 5 or 6 OS: Embedded Microsoft or Linux • The world’s first non-blocking single-chip 10Gb Ethernet switches • Offers industry’s lowest latency in 10Gb Ethernet Switching (450ns fall-through latency) • Delivers 240 Gbps throughput performance with compact form factor • Includes link aggregation, IGMP snooping and port security Fujitsu XG Series RAID INC. RAID Incorporated (www.raidinc.com) in Lawrence, MA, offers three products that are well-suited to demanding video production applications: the Falcon III dual-channel 4GB Fibre to SATA II, which scales to 8TB; the Phoenix 4GB Fibre and SATA II, which scales to 240TB; and the Magellan Fibre SAS/SATA II, which scales to 30TB. All the systems handle four streams of HD in dual controller mode. “We can achieve 800Mbps in RAID-5,” says RAID’s COO Bob Picardi. “We also have the ability to remotely monitor every solution from our storage Network Operations Center 24/7 and provide a four-hour response anywhere in the US.” Called StorageWatch, the patent-pending technology performs predictive analysis, which securely detects and corrects data irregularities. Using SAN (Storage Area Network) technology, editors and artists can share the same media assets at very high-speed, resulting in increased productivity and faster delivery of the finished product. Fujitsu MX SAS drives • 3.5-inch RoHS compliant Enterprise Hard Disk Drives offer 15K RPM spindle speed and feature storage capacities up to 147GB/hdd • Mean-time-between-failure (MTBF) of 1,4000,000 power-on hours • Native Command Queuing (NCQ), providing faster execution of operation commands NAB Booth SU 236 *Capacity determined by number of enclosures Rorke Data, Incorporated 9700 W. 76th Street • Eden Prairie, MN 55344 800.328.8147 • 952.829.0300 Fax 952.829.0988 SAN • Fibre Channel • RAID • Archive Libraries • Servers • Installation • Service & Maintenance Rorke Data reserves the right to change product specifications without notice. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 10 Storage Solutions Creative Collaboration APACE Apace Systems (www.apacesystems. com) offers vStor for video sharing and collaboration. vStor is for realtime shared editing of up to 50 DV25 or HDV streams or eight SD/compressed HD streams, such as DNxHD or DVCPRO. Apace also offers eStor for nearline, uncompressed HD sharing, rendering, offline editing, graphics and animation, as well as fast, disk-based archive and content retrieval. eStor can serve as a nearline backup to storage systems like Avid Unity, as well as providing local storage of uncompressed HD to systems like Avid DS Nitris. It can support an unlimited numbers of DV users for capturing and editing at faster-than-realtime speed for compressed DV, HDV and SD, and near realtime speed for uncompressed HD. According to Lee Hu, president of Orange, CA’s Apace Systems, “Both systems offer RAID-5 or RAID-6 protected centralized storage for a heterogeneous OS environment, as well as support for many applications, including Avid Xpress, Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas and Discreet Smoke.” Both run on 10Gb Ethernet for throughput of up to 400MBps, with scalability from 12TB in a single, four-unit chassis and up to hundreds of terabytes as units are added. APPLE Apple (www.apple.com) in Cupertino, CA, offers two complementary products that enable efficient data sharing in highly demanding applications — Xsan and Xserve. Xsan is an affordable, enterprise-class SAN solution that lets multiple computers concurrently access terabytes, even petabytes, of storage on the Xserve, which may be accessed via a high-speed Fibre Channel network. Xsan takes advantage of the 64-bit file system in the Mac OS X V.10.4 Tiger OS and Fibre Channel to allow massive files to move at up to 400MBps. Xsan can be used with the Apple dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5, a compact, affordable system that supports up to 1.5TB of storage. Each Xserve model features dual FireWire 800 ports, one FireWire 400 port, two USB 2.0 ports, and more. The Xserve cluster node configuration and processing power make it well suited to high-performance computing, workgroup clusters and renderfarms. ARCHION Archion’s new Synergy Plus storage systems are designed specifically for the Avid Unity shared storage environment. Its 4TB, 6.4TB and 8TB models transparently provide TBs of storage capacity, high bandwidth and hardware RAID capabilities to Unity systems. “In order to get the same level of protection as Synergy Plus, an Avid storage solution would need to have twice the amount of storage for the mirror,” says James A. Tucci, CTO of Burbank’s Archion (www.archion.com). “The benefit to users is not only increased storage capacity but greatly enhanced reliability. By providing large capacities of fully usable storage, Synergy Plus enables workflows that were either cost prohibitive or too risky due to the lack of RAID protection.” The Synergy Plus RAID controller firmware provides transparent Unity compatibility with the highest bandwidths available. Using dual Fibre Channel ports, typical aggregate bandwidth is 320MBps. Seamless scalability is achieved by adding more units to the Unity system. Each Synergy Plus adds both storage and bandwidth to the system, unlike the daisy chaining of Fibre Channel drives which provides storage but no bandwidth. The bottom line is more data streams at higher bandwidth with less cost and more protection than traditional Avid Unity storage. AVID Rorke Data recently released the Qubex series of affordable, high-speed desktop RAID systems. S-10 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS Avid offers the Avid Unity ISIS, a fullyredundant solution for shared storage. Avid Unity ISIS uses enterprise-class SATA drives because they offer the best combination of 24.7 reliability and everincreasing storage capacity. “For video post production, the critical feature for any storage subsystem — whether it’s local or shared storage — is guaranteed realtime reads and writes,” says Andy Dale, senior product manager for storage and networking products at Avid Technology (www.avid.com) in Tewksbury, MA. “Avid is unique in its ability to enable very large workgroups to not only share Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 11 Archion’s Synergy Plus is designed for the Avid Unity shared storage environment. the same drives or workspaces, but to actually work on the same files at the same time, down to the frame level,” says Dale. “Customers can increase or decrease the size of a workspace onthe-fly, without destroying data or needing to restart the system. We can also turn RAID protection on or off on-thefly. Any such changes would destroy data on any other system that supports realtime workflows.” Following its acquisition of Medea Cor- The MediaVault 4Gbit Fibre Channel disk arrays are the leader in desktop performance with over 250MB/sec per channel. MediaVault is scalable and can easily support 4K film resolutions - in real time! poration in February 2006, Avid unveiled the Avid VideoRAID family of storage systems that delivers up to 5TB of highefficiency storage with guaranteed realtime access for multi-stream, high-bandwidth SD and HD workflows. EDIT SHARE EditShare’s name is really what the company is all about — safe, simultaneous, file sharing to improve workflow. The EditShare 5U is a five-rack unit sys- MediaVault has always been a leader in safeguarding your content with RAID 3 protection. Now MediaVault features an unprecedented level of protection with RAID 6. RAID 6 enables MediaVault to withstand two simultaneous disk drive failures! tem with 24 hot-swappable bays that can be configured with up to 12TB of storage in RAID-5. The system is sold “fully-populated” with 24 250GB, 400GB or 500GB drives, or “half-populated” for later expansion. “It’s designed to allow many editors to capture and edit simultaneously,” says Andy Liebman, founder/CEO of Boston’s EditShare (www.editshare.com). “We are [a] non-Avid storage solution that allows editors to open up and work from the exact same Avid Project.” The system is capable of 10 streams of uncompressed SD video, 32 streams of HDV or DV-25, or two streams of uncompressed 10-bit 1080i HD over Gigabit or 10 Gigabit Ethernet. Many leading nonlinear systems are supported, including Final Cut Pro, Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, and the entire Avid line, including legacy Meridian-based systems. “At this NAB,” says Liebman, “we will be showing an innovation that makes us infinitely scalable, so customers can put DiMeda is the clear choice for high performance, multi-user collaborative file sharing storage. Using standard 1Gbit or 10Gbit Ethernet, the DiMeda can support workgroup editing of DV, SD and lower resolution HD footage - with no expensive software required! Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 12 Storage Solutions EditShare offer a non-Avid storage solution that allows editors to open up and work from the same Avid project. an unlimited number of EditShare servers on their network — all managed from a single GUI.” FACILIS Facilis makes TerraBlock — with models ranging from the 8XS to the 24D — a virtual-volume, high-performance SAN solution, which centralizes storage assets for more effective creative collaboration. TerraBlock 2.0 employs the best attributes of a SAN and a NAS (Network Attached Storage), making it easily configurable and reliable. It combines intelligent drive management software with lower-cost SATA II drives and Fibre Channel connectivity. With TerraBlock, shared virtual volumes can exist on every client simultaneously, but still appear as native locally attached drives. “TerraBlock’s design lends itself to cross-platform data sharing,” says James McKenna, VP/principal of Facilis Technology (www.facilistech.com) in Hudson, MA. “Using reference files, artists can access the same source footage the editor is using in the cut without a copy or recapture process. This facilitates timely collaboration and maintenance of the pristine original data with no generational loss.” With the ability to store 48TB of data, TerraBlock 2.0 includes XOR Parity (RAID-5) protection, which greatly lowers storage overhead needed for data protection on a per virtual volume basis. A single server containing 24 disks can support 16 streams of uncompressed SD or three streams of 1080i 10-bit 4:4:4 uncompressed HD video or two realtime S-12 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS streams of 24fps 2K DPX. “With the additional bandwidth Facilis provides, our customers capture once and work in full resolution from multiple workstations, saving valuable time.” QLOGIC Apple Computer for use with its storage solutions, including Xserve RAID, Xsan and Final Cut Pro. SGI and Avid are two other companies that also incorporate QLogic components into their SAN solutions, under their own brand names. Apple, SGI and Avid complete the package by adding their own proprietary SAN file sharing software. Also, in its SANPro class of Fibre Channel switches, QLogic offers the SANBox 5200, a stackable Fibre Channel switch. It offers seamless scalability — by adding to the system’s initial eight ports in four port increments — and can be expanded on a pay-as-you-grow basis. And with the ability to stack four 10Gb ports, SANBox 5200 offers very high-performance affordably. “Post production editors and artists shouldn’t have to be experts in storage technology to get their jobs done,” says Klein. “They simply want SAN solutions that are fast and reliable. By working closely with third-party vendors, we’re ensuring that reliability and interoperability between all the components in the SAN.” QLogic also supports a variety of networking protocols to connect storage systems to servers. Recently, QLogic ac- As a vendor in the SAN space, QLogic offers all the connectivity hardware that enables users to connect servers to storage for collaborative workgroups. In its SAN Express kit, QLogic bundles its SAN Box Fibre Channel high-speed networking switch, plus SANblade Host Bus Adaptors (HBA), the necessary cables and SAN configuration and monitoring software. “We wrote our SAN software with many easy-to-use Wizards that walk users through every step of the SAN set- With TerraBlock from Facilis, shared virtual volumes can exist on up process,” says every client simultaneously, but still appear as native, locallyRyan J. Klein, SAN ar- attached drives. chitect for QLogic (www.qlogic.com) in Aliso Viejo, CA. quired PathScale because the company is “We also strive to make our solutions a leading provider of InfiniBand technolvery cost effective. Whereas a single ogy. “IB is a very fast, low latency protocol. Fibre Channel switch port could cost as While it cannot be used with most SAN much as $2,000 two or three years ago, configurations for post production today, today users can buy the SAN Box 1400, it holds a great deal of promise for the fuwhich is a 10-port Fibre Channel switch, ture,” says Klein. “The issue is that SAN file and volume level software necessary in for the same money,” says Klein. The SAN Box 1400 is one of many most post production environments is not QLogic products that is marketed by yet available for IB. However, for Fibre Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 14 Storage Solutions TIGER QLogic’s SanBox 5200 is a stackable Fibre Channel switch that offers seamless scalability and can be expanded on a pay-as-you-grow basis. Channel, Apple has Xsan, SGI has CXFS and Avid has Unity, among other products out there, and that’s why Fibre Channel is the leading choice for SANs for post.” RORKE DATA Eden Prarie, MN’s Rorke Data (www.rorke.com) offers ImageSAN2 (www.imagesan.com), a shared storage solution created for the Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. While the system uses high-bandwidth Fibre Channel networking to transfer large media files, a typical SAN configuration also incorporates a LAN connection for exchanging metadata between the workgroup members and the system designated as the Metadata Master. ImageSAN2’s Metadata Master supervises the volumes and protects data from corruption when the other workgroup members access the shared storage. So service data travels over the LAN while bigger media assets benefit from the higher performance inherent in the SAN. This innovative approach is designed to enable significant productivity gains and storage savings. Also, Rorke Data just announced the launch of the Qubex series of affordable, high-speed desktop RAID systems. It features a compact six-drive enclosure, highperformance 4Gb Fibre Channel or Ultra320 SCSI host connections and up to 3TB of SATA II RAID storage for 300MBps data transfer, sufficient to edit uncompressed HD video streams. S-14 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS SANBOLIC Sanbolic, Inc. (www.sanbolic.com) in Watertown, MA, offers the Melio File System 2.0 and LaScala volume manager 2.0, designed to simplify SAN environments based on Microsoft Windows. Melio FS and LaSala create virtualized storage assets and provide data centers with flexible architecture for assigning SAN storage across servers in response to dynamic computing needs. SGI The SGI InfiniteStorage 9700 is a highperformance shared storage solution that combines a 4Gb Fibre Channel architecture with increased host connectivity to deliver up to 1600MBps of sustained bandwidth provided by the system’s eight 4Gb host channels. “With our 4Gbps solution, customers can more rapidly access and manage large, multi-terabyte stores of data without having to cut them up into small, hard-to-manage pieces to accommodate narrow-bandwidth storage infrastructures,” says Louise Ledeen, senior marketing manager for SGI (www.sgi.com) in Mountain View, CA. “Faster data access means greater productivity and shorter time to completion and discovery.” By implementing 4Gb solutions, “Users can significantly reduce the amount of infrastructure required to access and manage their storage,” adds Ledeen. “This results in lower cost of ownership and far simpler configurations to manage.” “When you have multiple computers directly attached to a single storage device, each thinks that the storage belongs exclusively to them,” says Bernard Lamborelle, director of sales for Montreal’s Tiger Technology (www.tiger-technology. com). “That’s why a critical component to any SAN workgroup is SAN software, such as our MetaSAN, which performs SAN ‘arbitration.’ When different clients expect to read and write to the same drive using the same data assets, MetaSAN creates an orderly environment in which this data sharing can occur.” MetaSAN is hardware- and networkagnostic, cross-platform compatible (PC, Linux and Mac) and scalable from small DV workgroups up to large installations, such as a 30-seat SAN doing broadcastquality work. “MetaSAN enables [users] to build their SANs using whatever storage and networking components best fit their budget and performance requirements,” says Lamborelle. Tiger also offers MetaLAN, which turns any MetaSAN workstation into a Gigabit Ethernet server to bring many of the SAN benefits to the LAN clients. “Together, MetaSAN and MetaLAN form building blocks that can meet a wide range of demands for scalability, budget and performance,” says Lamborelle. XYRATEX Xyratex (www.xyratex.com) of Havant, England, is an OEM provider of storage solutions, including for manufacturers Tiger Technology’s MetaSAN is hardwareand network-agnostic, cross-platform compatible and scalable. Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM catering to the high-performance needs of video and film production. Their RS1602-F4-SBD 4G is a new 4Gb Fibre Channel SBOD (Switched Bunch of Disks) solution that uses embedded technology to create a high-performance, point-to-point switched connection between the storage controller and the individual drives. This switched technology, as opposed to an arbitrated loop, offers substantially improved read/write performance levels of up to 1.6GBps per enclosure in standard operation, expandable to 3.2GBps. Each 3U enclosure supports 16 drives, which can be either high performance 4G FC drives or, for the first time, high capacity SATA II drives. Customers can now realize both high performance and ultra high capacity in a single 4G enclosure. The RS-1602-F4-SDB supports scaling up to 13 enclosures. “The switched, SBOD technology dramatically improves data availability and substantially reduces latency, especially Rorke Data’s Qubex low-cost RAID 5 system packs 3TB of whisper quiet disk storage right on your desktop! But don’t let the compact size fool you, the Qubex delivers more than enough performance to handle today’s professional HD edit and effects applications. Page 15 Xyratex’s RS-1600 is a 2Gb Fibre Channel RAID disk array. in systems with large disk counts, which is paramount in video applications, especially in 2K and 4K resolution,” says Tim Piper, director of product marketing. “It’s ideal for data intensive applications or, with SATA II drive, true-tiered storage.” 1ST DESIGN The IntelliRaid from 1st Design, the storage division of 1Beyond (www.1beyond.com) in Somerville, MA, comes in SCSI and Fibre Channel models. When used in an FC SAN configuration, the sustained data rate is over 1GBps. When directly attached, the throughput is over 700MBps and over 450MBps with a dual SCSI. Both the FC and SCSI versions will handle film 4:4:4 color as well HD. Eight streams of SD and two streams of the highest HD format are supported in the upper end systems. “One of the holy grails of the storage industry has been to have the storage unit produce an alert when a problem is developing but before a problem occurs,” says Terry Cullen, 1Beyond’s founder/CEO. “With SATA II intelligence, this is now possible.” The IntelliRaid will actually email the IT administrator when this occurs. And with its RAID-6 capabilities, a “hot spare” can be designated and the system will repair itself. No data is lost. We Hope Size Doesn’t Matter. We Know Price Does. • 1TB to 3TB SATA II per enclosure • 4Gbit Fibre Channel or U320 SCSI Dual Host • 400MB/sec transfer rate on a Single Channel • Supports 4:4:4 uncompressed HD • Easy to Service and Maintain 3TB of HD-Ready Desktop RAID Low MSRP Only $6995! For 3TB • Unbeatable price/performance ratio Rorke Data, Incorporated • 9700 W. 76th Street • Eden Prairie, MN 55344 800.328.8147 • 952.829.0300 • Fax 952.829.0988 NAB Booth SU 236 SAN • Fibre Channel • RAID • Archive Libraries • Servers • Installation • Service & Maintenance Rorke Data reserves the right to change product specifications without notice. Storage SolutionsMLV3.qxd 4/13/06 10:59 AM Page 16 Storage Solutions Glossary The following Glossary defines a few of the buzzwords relevant to post FIBRE CHANNEL Fibre Channel is a high-speed network technology that’s widely deployed in post, especially for SANs. It’s available in three versions: Fibre Channel (1Gbps yielding about 125MBps), 2Gb Fibre Channel (2Gbps yielding 250MBps) and 4Gb Fibre Channel (4Gbps yielding 500MBps). It’s also easily scalable in that you can combine two 4Gb Fibre Channel ports to effectively double the throughput available to the clients. [Source: Tiger Technology] the potential to surpass Fibre Channel in both price/performance and industry deployment. [Source: DataDirect] iSCSI iSCSI (Internet SCSI), is an IP-based standard for linking data storage devices over a network and transferring data by carrying SCSI commands over IP networks. iSCSI supports a Gig-E interface, which allows systems supporting iSCSI interfaces to connect directly to standard Gig-E switches and/or IP routers. iSCSI enables a SAN to be deployed in a LAN or WAN. [Source: www.webopedia.com]. sure, connected together to form a group. The method of grouping and level of protection, if any, will be relayed by the RAID number. For example: RAID-0 is drive striping; RAID-1 is drive mirroring, RAID-5 parity protection, etc. [Source: Facilis] SAN A LAN (Local Area Network) is a computer network that spans a small area, usually a building or group of buildings. A system of interconnected LANs is called a WAN (Wide Area Network). [Source: www.webopedia.com] SAN (Storage Area Network) is a networking technology allowing one or more storage systems to be directly connected to multiple computers to enable creative collaboration and sharing of the same media assets at high speed. Because individual computers aren’t aware that other computers are accessing the same storage, SANs require special SAN software that arbitrates or polices which client has read/write privileges at any time. Because SANs typically use Fibre Channel for its high-speed, SANs greatly benefit high-end applications involving HD, 2K or 4K film resolution data. [Source: Tiger] GIGABIT ETHERNET MTBF SAS Gigabit Ethernet is a version of Ethernet that supports data transfer rates of 1Gbps. However, the next-generation of Gigabit Ethernet is arriving with 10Gbps. Because the bandwidth is shared, network performance is dependent upon the number of clients and the amount of data they are requesting. Gig-E also has inherent “overhead” network processing that diminishes the speed. Far less costly and easier to install than FC. [Source: Tiger Technology] MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) tests are conducted by disk drive manufacturers to quantify a drive’s reliability. [Source: DataDirect] SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) is a new drive technology coming to market in late 2006 and promises up to 3Gbps. It’s considered the replacement for SCSI, including Ultra320 SCSI drives, which has reached its end of life. SAS and SATA drives can be housed in the same storage subsystem, however, the overall performance will be limited to SATA’s lower performance, so mixing them is not really recommended in high performance apps. [Source: DataDirect] FIREWIRE FireWire (or IEEE 1394) is a very fast external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of up to 400Mbps (in 1394a) and 800Mbps (in 1394b). A single 1394 port can be used to connect up 63 external devices. Although fast and flexible, 1394 is expensive. [Source: www.webopedia.com] InfiniBand InfiniBand (IB) is an industry-standard networking technology, which emerged circa 2000 only to fail due to the dot.com bust. It’s now re-emerging as “new and improved” high-performance networking capable of exceeding Fibre Channel’s current 4Gbps data rate. One advantage is that IB can see many clustered pools of cached storage as one giant cache. This capability, called RDMA (or Remote Direct Memory Access), enables users to run their applications far faster due to its more efficient approach to moving data. IB has S-16 • STORAGE SOLUTIONS LAN and WAN NAS NAS (Network Attached Storage) is based upon Gig-E connecting any number of clients to a server or other storage appliance device on the network. Less costly and complex than a SAN, a NAS is an ideal choice for those editing in DV or other compressed video formats. [Source: Tiger Technology] PATA PATA (Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment) are being phased out of the media-rich content creation business because they are being supplanted by newer SATA drive technology. ATA is also known as IDE. [Source: DataDirect] SATA SATA (Serial ATA) drives, is meant to replace older PATA (Parallel-ATA) drive technology, and promises a higher degree of reliability than has been seen in lower-end drives. Transfer rates for SATA start at 150MBps. [Source: www.webopedia.com] SATA II RAID Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) is the designation for a number of disks in a single location or enclo- Compared to SATA, SATA II offers increased storage performance and enhanced data handling features for improved reliability. [Source: DataDirect]