Pandoras Box User Forum

Hello,

We are trying to find innovative solutions to conserve and use storage space due to some extreme requirements of our permanent install projects. Has anyone configured the use of a shared RAID volume to be used by all media players on the same network? Ideally, we would like each player (one active and one hot spare) to share the same data to minimize the amount of SSD drives we have to run.

Notes on project:
DDS Image Seq
10TB of content
60fps
(2) 1920x1080 outputs
(1) Active media player STD
(1) Hot spare media player STD

Any thoughts on this topic? What is the procedures in spreading if both players share the same content?

Any comments/thoughts are appreciated.

with regards,
tyler
standardvision
los angeles

Tyler emailed me about this earlier and my thoughts were that there might be issues with how the spreading system copies files. Would you have to spread manually?

Also, the hardware is tricky. You would need a fast bus speed, maybe Fibre Channel?

Any ideas?

The hardware setup we have specced currently allows for 1800mb/sec thru put. Is this acceptable for DDS image sequences?

Thinking about it more, I would guess that the problem would be in accessing the same files at the same time by multiple computers.
Any delay would cause an error in rendering that would be very noticeable.

Fibre-Channel and NAS systems generally have the multiple file-request stuff sorted out.

It really comes down to the interconnect and how many concurrent connections it can handle. If you do a single frame transcode and determine how big a single DDS file is the multiply by frame-rate, you'll figure out if your bandwidth is acceptable. It is largely dependent on whether you're using a switched fabric kind of system, and what sort of seek times your RAID controller can maintain when multiple requests come in.

1800mb/sec = 225MB/sec which would mean that at 30fps your files could safely be about 5 megs per frame. But I don't know if the 1800mb/sec is for a single client or for a fully loaded system. This matters... a lot.

You would have to avoid spreading the media altogether. You'd need to place it on the NAS, map network drives on all the client machines to the directory where the files are on the NAS, and then use the "Attach" feature in the Inspector. The advantage to this would be that it doesn't take any time at all to Attach files.

If you wind up testing this setup, I would be VERY interested in the results. What interconnect are you using?

Hmmmm.
That could be a problem because you can't attach an image sequence in the current version.

Le sigh...

yes you can. i just did it a whole bunch of times. you just browse to the directory holding the image sequence and away it goes.

Awesome. I was told otherwise.

Thanks!