Using External Drives for ANY Servers (formely SX)

Well, someone might say differently, but you don't want the weak link in your on air broadcast chain to be cheap external drives. I'm not sure if Tightrope condones such an act. :) You could call and ask them. If you were, I would at least get one of the raid 0 external drives so when one fails, and it will eventually as you pound on it, there will be a backup. Just be ready to replace the broken drive in the external enclosure readily.

Do you have other storage on your network? You can map a drive from your playback server to that storage and use that as the default directory where shows sit. This can work fine over GIG-E from my recollection. This way if you have a few TB of space somewhere, you can leverage it. We had about 14 TB of apple storage a couple of years ago we were also using as shared editing storage. Because all 4 luns were fiber connected to one apple server which then had two gig-e acting with one ip address over the network, things were speedy. Moving finished encoded material from one lun to the playback lun took a couple seconds even with shows that were 10 GB large.

Good times!

Michael Dube
617-290-6453
trmsboards@mikedube.com

quote:Originally posted by dubiousmike



Do you have other storage on your network? You can map a drive from your playback server to that storage and use that as the default directory where shows sit.

Having a VS4, with 1 TB of storage (which has performed admirably for almost 5 years), and occasionally running out of room without cleaning house, I would like to explore using some NAS. But I would like to use another SAN I have on my Gig-E network to SUPPLEMENT the 1 TB on the VS4, not replace it. Can I map a new network drive for the server and NOT make it the default storage location? In other words, how can I use both at the same time?

Shawn Serre
Pittsfield Community TV
sserre@pittsfieldtv.org

I believe what you can do is to have outputs one and two feed from your internal storage and three and four fed from your NAS / SAN. Be wary of NAS as I have found few cost effective ones that I felt comfortable with its sustained read speeds when in RAID 5.

Tightrope guys can correct me if I am wrong regarding splitting your four outputs like I mentioned.

Michael Dube
617-290-6453
trmsboards@mikedube.com

Thank you for the info.
I think the idea was to investigate "stretching" our hard drive real estate with something like a Lacie Ethernet Drive setup.
4TBs at raid 1,0,5,or 10.
These are hot swappable (4) and would be used for file based (other than M-Peg2 files).
Just wondering if anyone has ever attempted this and what kind of success it was met with.
I agree this is to be attemped with caution when assigning to air.
Maybe we will test bed this over our inhouse network to keep an eye on it before unleashing it on our cable TV viewers.
Anyone else have any ideas or comments, they are certainly welcome as we leap off the edge of broadcast sanity:)

You should definitively call LaCie and ask them what happens if the power supply dies. Sure, with RAID 5, a drive dies and you plop a new drive in and 1 to 12 hours later, you are back up to full strength. What happens if the power supply dies? Is it no problem to replace the power supply and all of your data is still there?

Also, if a drive goes out, what is the sustained read speed reduced to while the RAID is rebuilding? You need to know so you don't encode shows at a certain bit rate, only to find you can't play them back while you are rebuilding your RAID.

Also, if the internal RAID card dies, what happens to your data. This is the true testament to how hard core it is. Cheap RAIDS corrupt your data when the internal RAID card dies. Don't get me wrong, the "I" in RAID stands for inexpensive, but it applies to the disk and not everything else.

Is there a battery on the RAID card? nope. might not matter as long as you aren't writing when the power goes off.

You should also test to see what happens when the power goes out and back on. Does your LaCie boot up faster than your playback server? Hopefully as you don't want Windows to say the storage isn't available. Perhaps it handles that gracefully. Does the playout card software /TRMS handle that gracefully? This just might mean that if you have a reboot, that you are notified and can log into the box to make sure all is right in your world.

Make sure this data lives elsewhere too unless you are sure the data will remain intact if one of your parts dies.

I Like LaCie, but I am worried about it in a mission critical situation, 24/7.

I wonder if for the price, you can get something more robust with redundant power supplies, batteries on your RAID card and all hot swappable parts, not just the drives. But I am a worry wart about these things. :)

Michael Dube
617-290-6453
trmsboards@mikedube.com

Can someone post a step-by-step for adding storage in this way? I assume you can map a network drive on the video server machine to the location of the network drive. After that, where is the control in cablecast to recognize this location as a place to draw files from?

Shawn Serre
Pittsfield Community TV
sserre@pittsfieldtv.org

It's fairly easy to set up. You add the search path to the control module settings for the server.

1) Share the remote drive
2) In the control module settings for the Tightrope server, where it likely now says E:\ as the only entry (Port/Local Path box), add the UNC path for the remote share. Separate the locations with a "pipe" character. So, a new entry might be:

e:\|\\Server2\share|\\Server3\share

You do not need to map the remote drive to a drive letter on the Tightrope server.

Jonathan Einarsen
Contract Video Specialists, Inc
(A Tightrope Dealer)
www.contractvideo.com

We have a VS4 and are using it with a iSCSI array. This is outboard 6TB storage array with a iSCSI controller installed and its connected to our GigE switch. Our VS4 then connects to the same GigE switch via Gigabit and is running Microsoft's iSCSI initiator software. When it is all set and running, the storage array looks to the VS4 as a attached drive we letter it X:. We had to break up the 6TB array into just under 2TB chunks as WindowsXP can't deal with anything over that I believe was the problem.
When I monitor the data traffic coming in/out of the ethernet port to the iSCSI array, it only measures about +/- 1% of rated traffic capacity with 1 stream of 6-8Mbps Mpeg2 playing on one channel of the VS4. So there is seemly PLENTY of headroom if all 4 channels were playing at 8Mbps.
So far this has been working well for about 10 months with no real glitches. The array is RAID5 with a built-in hotspare.
Manufacture is RAID Inc. and the system is called the Orion. They also make Fibre Channel and other systems.
[url]http://www.raidinc.com/[/url]

Using I/O meter, I think we were getting about 60 Megabytes a second read speed through the connection. It has been while since I ran that test so I can't recall the exact number. But it was plenty for sure.

As I look at all the files on that array (231 right now). They range from 659megs to 8.2GB in file size. We encode our public meetings at 3Mbps and most of our 1/2hour edited shows at 8Mbps and other long form shows are in between depending on the setting of the DVD recorder we used to master them.

Hope that helps.
Good Luck
Grant

Jonathan, thanks for that info, pretty straightforward. I'll have to give that a spin.

So when we add files (by importing, encoding, etc.) where do they get put? Does the system try to write first to the E: drive, then to the next share listed in that control module setting? Or is is one location per server output?

Shawn Serre
Pittsfield Community TV
sserre@pittsfieldtv.org

quote:Originally posted by andrew

The encoder has its own drive settings, which cannot be piped. The encoder will always dump into the same directly, which would be E:\ or where ever you set it to.


Andrew Alan Starks
Co-Founder, Tightrope Media Systems
(866) 866-4118, 201
www.trms.com

Surely though the capture goes to a temporary directory on a directly connected drive and then finally to the specified play out directory? I have never experienced reliable encoding over gig-e for broadcast material.

Michael Dube
617-290-6453
trmsboards@mikedube.com

I'm pretty sure you have to specify a local drive in the control module setup. That becomes the temp and final directory. You can also specify a UNC share path in the device setup that will cause the system to move the file to an external share when the encode completes. That's an FTP push after the fact.

Two things to remember for this to work. First, the cablecast control module service on the encoder has to be setup to use the administrator account credentials. Second, the ending event in the device setup needs to have BOTH RecordStop and MoveFile highlighted.

Last, I think there was a problem with the UNC move on SX encoders in 4.7.0 that I'm pretty sure has been corrected in 4.7.2.

This feature is available for all Tightrope supported encoders.

Jonathan Einarsen
Contract Video Specialists, Inc
(A Tightrope Dealer)
www.contractvideo.com