Marketing - Video Editing Storage
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@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Obsolesce said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
Originally, I was looking at proposing a 20 - 30 TB NAS populated with SSDs in the local office, with 10 Gbps NIC. This would provide high speed local access over the LAN to 6 marketing users.
If their PCs accessing a NAS at 1-10Gbps isn't good enough because their primary concern is speed, why would they push for way slower cloud storage, assuming no on-prem cache?
1 - 10 Gbps would be more than fine. That is what I proposed. But, the CIO is asking that the storage is Cloud only. Leading to this issue where the editing workstations are in office and the storage is remote.
I would connect the CIO with the users and ask if waiting hours or days to work on a file is good enough. Let the CIO take that up with users.
The CIO is pretty much of the opinion that the user should plan better and download files they need for editing whilst working on something else.
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@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
This looks like another option, although, it does just look like a NAS to me, just through a specific 'media' vendor.
That's a scam. I use those guys about once a week as an example of "market vertical scams." I've had customers get seriously screwed over by them.
Never buy "industry" IT equipment, it's always a scam. IT is IT, anything industry specific is another way of saying "not good enough to pass IT muster, so we try to bypass IT by claiming it's specifically made for an industry."
They literally make the worst storage you could possibly imagine.
Could you tell me more about this? I am not sure I fully understand but would like to. Is the thought that because its a "NAS for Editors" and not just a "NAS" that its not good, otherwise it would be a NAS for everybody regardless of need?
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@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
This looks like another option, although, it does just look like a NAS to me, just through a specific 'media' vendor.
That's a scam. I use those guys about once a week as an example of "market vertical scams." I've had customers get seriously screwed over by them.
Never buy "industry" IT equipment, it's always a scam. IT is IT, anything industry specific is another way of saying "not good enough to pass IT muster, so we try to bypass IT by claiming it's specifically made for an industry."
They literally make the worst storage you could possibly imagine.
Could you tell me more about this? I am not sure I fully understand but would like to. Is the thought that because its a "NAS for Editors" and not just a "NAS" that its not good, otherwise it would be a NAS for everybody regardless of need?
That's how you know it isn't good... it's being marketed that way because if IT looked at it, they'd know it was bad. But if they say "for editors", that's a trick to get the editors to say "IT doesn't know, because this is special for editors." But nothing, anywhere, in the world is special like that, IT factors are always the same. Anything trying to scam someone to get past IT oversight is because it couldn't compete if IT evaluated it.
The issues we found with them in the past:
- Insanely high pricetag, about 500% the cost of assembling their devices yourself.
- Just cheap, consumer crap mounted in a colorful chassis.
- Misconfigured to be both slow and very risky.
- No IT level support, it's people who don't know storage or editing conning people, so when something goes wrong, what do you do?
Or reverse it... there is nothing, whatsoever, good about their products. Other than giving it a marketing name to trick people into thinking it is designed for editing, what does it have going for it? It doesn't have the engineering, support, market knowledge, standardization, honesty, intent, or price of appropriate equipment. What would make someone consider it in the first place? From what we found before... nothing. We were never able to identify a single factor that would make it viable, let alone put it on a list for consideration.
That's the entire trick. Just take any generic PC with several hard drives, slap "designed for editing" on the box and voila, people will short list it and never evaluate it against industry standards. A better option would be, for example, Synology, QNAP, ReadyNAS and other generic SAN units. And that's not saying that they are good options, only that they are similar, but vastly better options. Or just build a SAM-SD. Essentially it's a SAM-SD built by people without knowledge of computing basics.
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@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@scottalanmiller said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Obsolesce said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
@Jimmy9008 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
Originally, I was looking at proposing a 20 - 30 TB NAS populated with SSDs in the local office, with 10 Gbps NIC. This would provide high speed local access over the LAN to 6 marketing users.
If their PCs accessing a NAS at 1-10Gbps isn't good enough because their primary concern is speed, why would they push for way slower cloud storage, assuming no on-prem cache?
1 - 10 Gbps would be more than fine. That is what I proposed. But, the CIO is asking that the storage is Cloud only. Leading to this issue where the editing workstations are in office and the storage is remote.
I would connect the CIO with the users and ask if waiting hours or days to work on a file is good enough. Let the CIO take that up with users.
The CIO is pretty much of the opinion that the user should plan better and download files they need for editing whilst working on something else.
That's fine, make them have that discussion together.
Basically you have users saying "We need X." And the CIO is saying "No, you don't." Both are reasonable, so they need to hash it out.
BUT, let's say that they do what the CIO says... now... where do they store those files and share them? Oh wait, now they need the solution that they asked for in the first place again, right? So the CIO is actually proposing an additional solution, and ignoring the request. Cloud storage of the archives seems like it was always the obvious answer. And it in no way addresses the local cache.
That he is saying that they should "plan ahead and have a local cache" doesn't disagree with what they have requested. That's exactly what they are asking him to provide.
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Here is an example...
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/evo/#8bay
Eight bays, generic SATA/SAS attached storage. Not NVMe. This is a ton slower, and way more expensive, than my laptop. When you have lots of people needing to work on big files, this isn't going to cut it. This is going to be a fraction of local file speeds which kind of defeats the purpose.
They never tell you the most basic things, like is it NAS or SAN? They leave out all critical details because they don't want anyone evaluating it technically. But I know that it is a SAN, both because I am aware of their products (they even make their own iSCSI initiator software instead of using standard ones or high performance ones like Starwind) and because it is the only way to do this.
Editing does life file sharing with raw file manipulation. SO to work in a multiple user environment NAS isn't an option, only SAN is. This is one of SAN's biggest use cases.
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If you want to do this cheaply (and that probably makes sense), then Synology is what I would do, or a SAM-SD if you are so inclined.
If you want to spend money, then you are likely going to want to use Fibre Channel to lower latency, or the insanely high performance Starwind initiators.
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My guess is that you need cloud storage and local shared storage. I'd approach the CIO (and the users) with... okay, we need low cost cloud storage to keep files we aren't working on.
Then say "okay, now we need a shared local cache of files that we can work on live"... that means SAN and only SAN, nothing else can do that. So, how do we want to accomplish this?
Because if they don't have a SAN, they have to not only keep a copy of the files, but they have to coordinate working on the files between them. And they have to send copies around to each other. How will they do that? And how much additional storage will be needed if everyone has to keep copies of the different files, and how will versioning be handled if the copies exist only on their local machines?
Does he expect the people to edit a file, upload it back to the cloud, and have the next person in the pipeline download that file again, from the cloud, to work on it? A single file of 400GB could have 4TB of transfers if you only work from the cloud!
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Final Cut Pro in the latest 10.4 release added functionality for NFS and SMB shares, as well as clustered Xsan SAN. However, a key note for that, is that Windows SMB and Windows NFS are not supported. Windows file servers lack key functionalities for SMB and NFS that MacOS and Linux with Samba provide that are required for use.
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I don't' have any specific product but Atto Technologies comes to mind to look at for something like this.
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@jt1001001 said in Marketing - Video Editing Storage:
I don't' have any specific product but Atto Technologies comes to mind to look at for something like this.
They make pieces for building a serious enterprise scale media workflow like HBAs and iSCSI options for MacOS. Their focus is specialty high performance Mac hardware. I don't think that they offer any solutions, but they have nice components and some software.
