JonM's dashboard

Hi Lucas. Yes this is possible in the current integration FCSrv. In fact, we allow you to archive/restore entire productions with a single click, which is very useful in this case. I would also agree with your workflow as described.

At ingest you have a choice whether to immediately start putting the ingested assets straight into FCSrv or whether to wait until after you've done some editing (e.g., in FC Studio) before moving it into FCSrv. However, it is a very good habit to get into putting it in asap, and making sure to add as much metadata as possible at that stage. The metadata will live with the data making it infinitely easier to find the data again in the future. MxS will also keep the metadata with the data, meaning that if you ever lose/move on from FCSrv you still can get back that metadata, or search on it using another tool such as the DropSpot application we provide (free).

The Dell NF600 would probably work very well as a node, but we'd need to double check that with the specs before that can be confirmed. But, sorry - the Linux version isn't available as a free download at this point in time :(

If you'd like to contact us to discuss that further, please do so via:
http://www.matrixstore.net/contact/

If you could give us more details (number of nodes, amount of storage, configurations, what it would be used for), it's possible we'll be able to help out in some way.

Absolutely. However...
1. you need 3 nodes... a node being CPU plus storage. OK - you can run on two nodes, but then if one falls over, there's no fallback location for data to be moved to, and writing requires two nodes to write to.
2. disk channel speed makes a big difference to the speed of the write/read operations - so yes - firewire will work, but obviously not as quickly as fiber /etc.

Good luck :)

It doesn't need to be connected via fiber channel... the important thing is that the OS (Mac or Linux) can mount the storage as a volume.

The overall solution speed is generally affected by three "bottlenecks":
1. Speed of the connection (gigE generally)
2. Speed of the CPU (it is CPU intensive to extract data from the NIC, decode it, and then buffer it to the disk)
3. Speed of the disk channel for write/read.

If you have a slow disk channel, e.g., 30MB/s is typical on limited or badly configured hardware, then don't expect to get more than 30MB/s write/read. A decently configured Xserve/Xserve RAID with fiber can of course achieve a lot more speed than that, but the MatrixStore software doesn't require that speed.

Interesting to compare the two RAID arrays to each other, promise has:
- 16 instead of 14 disks (and therefore capacity)
- true duality in the disk controller = failover
- 4Gbps fibre channel

Those are all easy to pinpoint. Long term durability of the product in typical Apple work environments... that's another thing, but for sure, Apple wont have chosen to work with this product without having first considered a lot of other products. It would be bad for Apple's name and it's reputation in the video production industry if this product didn't perform well.

Only time will tell; but I'd love to know exactly which products were in the beauty parade that Apple were considering from.

Interestingly, the new Xserves come with optional raid controller hardware devices - these can be battery backed-up, making for a potentially reliable and fast storage device for up to 3TB. Xserve 8 core...wow! Once again Apple are putting Xserves at the forefront.

Some bumph about the hardware RAID option:

"Coupled with two or more hard drives, the Xserve RAID Card offers improved performance and data protection to your Xserve system - up to 318MB/s in RAID 0 and 198MB/s in RAID 5 of sequential read performance. This hardware RAID option supports RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and Enhanced JBOD and has 256MB of cache. And it features an integrated 72-hour battery backup for protecting the RAID cache. The card replaces the built-in SATA/SAS controller and does not use a PCI Express slot.

Raid 5 requires 3 disk drives.

Protection and performance; can survive a single disk failure; efficient capacity utilization

The Xserve RAID Card supports the creation of multiple RAID sets in a system and multiple volumes per RAID set. For optimal disk utilization in a RAID set, all hard drives should be the same size and must be the same type (SATA or SAS). Your Xserve system ships with each hard drive individually configured as an Enhanced JBOD drive with the bootable operating system installed on the first drive. Using Apple's RAID Utility software, you can migrate the boot drive into a RAID set without reinstalling or reformatting the drive, or you can customize your RAID volumes to your exact requirements."

It was running fine in P - e.g., explorer was working, but then within QB it would BSOD...