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File Server Recommendations for Compositing...?

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  • File Server Recommendations for Compositing...?

    Recently, here at work, we've reached near capacity on the server we've been using to store our rendered animation passes for compositing. So it's time to retire this file server, and put him out to pasture, as a back up server.

    This old server had 8 raided drives, totally 5 TB. But these days, since we are doing more and more compositing work, with lots more layers and render elements, our demands for both capacity and file access speed has greatly increased. So we are looking to build a new file server that is robust enough to handle fast file access speeds from multiple computers, and also is scalable enough so we'll be able to add drives as our space requirements increase.

    I'm wondering what you pro's are doing these days. Besides simply raiding drives, are there recommendations people would make? I suppose you could raid together a series of SSD these days, and get some crazy fast file access, if you wanted to spend a bucket of money.

    Any suggestions?
    David M. Foster

  • #2
    i don´t think, that it you can profit of ssds in raid, as long as you use it in network. i think the network is the limiting factor. gigabit should be at max 100MB/s. so you don´t need ssds with 180MB/s or more writespeed....

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    • #3
      You are rarely going to see 100mb/s via samba on a GBit Network. 10G is a steep step up in pricing tho. There are many factors playing a role when building your own rigs. CPU Power and RAM (with many clients, high throughtput and or many reads) can be a bottleneck just as well.

      Regards,
      Thorsten

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      • #4
        id look at systems or software that sychronises data between your server and a local ssd or raid array for editing.. without spending a fortune it would be very hard to get realtime performance on multiple hd streams...

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        • #5
          Thanks guys. And yes, I'm sure you're right; it's the network speed that's the bottleneck, not the drive speed.

          Super gnu, that sounds promising. Seems like that could give me the best of all worlds. I'll search around online a bit, but have you used a software like that, which you would recommend?
          David M. Foster

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          • #6
            hmm.. well im not sure if "dropbox" could be used in this manner.. its excellent, but i believe its designed specifically for synching with clients over the internet. you dont want all your hd uncompressed streams going via a server in outer mongolia.


            theres "allways sync" this is a nice bit of software i used in the past that should handle your needs. i used it in a similar fashion, mirroring an entire job folder to my local hard drive from our main server at work.

            once you start searching for drive and folder mirroring software, theres a crapload out there, of which maybe there is one specifically designed for editing /compositing places.. seems like something that should exist.

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            • #7
              Depending on the comp tool(s) you use i would suggest looking at integrated scripts/solutions as that's a lot easier and less error prone (esp with net rendering). We have an inhouse localize tool
              in nuke that suit our workflows and infrastructure and localizing/de-localizing is at your fingertips during comp.

              Regards,
              Thorsten

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              • #8
                almost forgot... i downloaded this the other day.. its free, and might be up to your job..

                http://synkron.sourceforge.net/

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