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Participant

Howdy, I hope this won’t be too long, but I really need some input from people “in the trenches”!

OK, so the last time I posted was February. We tried to install an XSan with one XServe, and one XServe Raid (XSR). It SO didn’t work. I turned off our XSan and directly connected our XSR to the G5 for FCP. We just didn’t have enough XSRs to push the speed for uncompressed HD 1080i editing. So now we have money, and a need for multiple workstations to access the same footage. Now, of course, we are in the middle of a HD documentary, and the word from on high is “Make us have an XSan”. The real good news is the Blackmagic can take a HD-SDI stream and import DVCPRO HD (which is what we are shooting on). This means I should need a max bandwith of about 40MB per stream instead of 165MB per stream.

Here is what I’m thinking of doing. Purchase a second XServe (for secondary MDC and primary OD), one XSR with 7x500GB on one side and 2x250GB on the other (these 250s will be our MD/JD pool), and lastly another XSR with 7x500GB on a single RAID controller. The two 7x500s will be RAID-5 single LUNs, and the 2x250s will be a mirror single LUN. We already had to buy a MacPro with the Blackmagic Multibride Extreme that is sitting and doing nothing right now (long story).

If I have the 2x250s as my MD/JD pool, and it’s on one RAID controller. Then I can have two other RAID controllers for User Data. I can set up the MacPro as a client on the XSan. My G5 can continue to edit our doc during this time. Once the XSan is up (and had a shakedown), I can mount the G5’s directly connected storage and copy over ethernet the FCP project with all footage. Then I open the project on the MacPro, test it out and move the client/editor into that room to continue. Once they make that transition, I should be able to introduce the G5’s directly connected XSR into the XSan’s volume for twice the User Data Space (and two more RAID controllers). Also, I’ll introduce the G5 as a new client on the XSan.

This all sounds good in my head. Does anybody see any reason why this shouldn’t work?

Thank you very much for any help and your time.

~Daniel Harrell