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I am trying to get some clarity on the hardware requirements for a all HD 4 seat Final Cut Pro HD/ Xsan Xserve RAID setup.
The setup needs to be able to handle about 16 HD streams (4 per edit system) simultaneously at all times. This is a sort of mission critical broadcast application.
I am assuming a 160MB/sec sustained access rate per HD stream to base my hardware config on.
Each Xserve RAID has 2 controllers at about 80MB/each, right?
Here comes my flawed math:
I figure 160MB x 4 (on FCP editor w 4 realtime HD streams ) and multiply that figure times 4 to get to my overall IO requirement of about 2560 MB for the whole setup.
Now I divide that by 160 MB (Xserve RAID IO capacity w 2 controllers) and get to 16 Xserve RAIDS required. Is this crazy or realistic? Thanks much for reading and for providing this forum.
What kind of HD are you going to work with?
According to Apple’s Xsan workflow page: http://www.apple.com/xsan/videoworkflow.html
There’s quite a range of HD, from Compressed High Definition: DVCPRO HD = 5.8MBps to 14MBps, to Uncompressed High Definition, which ranges from 720p 24fps = 46MBps to 1080i (10-bit) = 165MBps.
Which is also reflected on Xsanity’s page: http://www.xsanity.com/staticpages/index.php/faq/
and from Peachit’s reference: http://safari.peachpit.com/0321369009/ch04
So, 4 streams of 1080 24p (10-bit) 110MBps is 440MBps required per station. And requires 3 RAIDs to be safe.
Does that sound right?
-x
A fantastic white paper originally available only to Apple resellers and channel partners has now been posted to the Final Cut Studio Resource page. You can find the link here:
[url]http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/resources/white_papers/L330496A-US_L330496A_ProApps_WP_ff.pdf[/url]
Adam Green penned the original document, and I have updated it for creating a simple Open Directory and ACLs. We’d love to hear feedback (especially if there are errors!), but additionally, it’s a great document to understand the bare bones of Xsan integration.
Cheers,
MattG
In case anyone else comes across similar lines of questions, in addition to what the other guys posted it’s also important to keep in mind that when you’re directing traffic, you need to take into account the number of LUNs per storage pool and then the number of clients using each pool. I recently setup a 4 concurrent stream 1080i system with 5 Xserve Raids. One volume divided into 2 storage pools of 4 luns totalling approx 15tb each. It really depends on number of concurrent streams and resolution which will ultimately dictate the total volume size.
Hope this helps,
Thank You,
Thomas Orona
Technology Consultant
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