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Apple Xsan and ADIC StorNext

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Rich Shurtliff and Sang-Jin Bae
Curious Pictures

Software and Hardware for a Fast, Price-Competitive SAN

Curious Pictures recently took on a new TV production series for Disney and needed to overhaul its IT infrastructure to keep up with the demanding production schedule.

Our production pipeline is built to create, produce, and deliver a TV production series on a weekly basis. Our production team works on at least 10 episodes for a Disney TV series at any one time, with one to air each week. We rely on our data pipeline to deliver work product in a stepwise fashion to our creative people, while at the same time making it all available for review and last-minute revisions.

Our productions begin with a script, collecting stock photographs, digitizing stock footage and sound, and a storyboard. An animatic, a simple movie consisting of the storyboard panels with recorded dialogue, is then assembled.

Before animation production begins, our creatives animate 2D characters, CG artists model 3D characters and props, and designers create all backgrounds and props digitally. Digital animators then composite all of these elements together into a final shot, including all the animation, CG, and designs. After rendering, the final shots are ready to be cut into the edit system for final output to tape.

Our desktop storage was a data bottleneck at a number of points in our production pipeline. Our directly attached desktop SCSI storage, for example, essentially behaved as isolated islands of data storage connected to one team member at a time. Work product could not be shared without swapping drives between workstations or transferring large files over Gigabit Ethernet. Swapping drives required team members to copy files they needed to work with to local storage, before relinquishing that data with their drives to another. Alternatively, transferring large files over our Gigabit Ethernet between team members was a slow process, one that became even slower as our production demands increased. We also wasted storage space because we had multiple copies of the same files in circulation.

We decided to work with the staff at DigitalMix, a company that specializes in network integration for video production and broadcast. At their suggestion, we consolidated our data by integrating a SAN with a global file system.

To enhance the performance of our Gigabit Ethernet, we added Fibre Channel connections from our Gigabit Ethernet file servers to the SAN. Replacing desktop storage with the SAN enabled us to consolidate all our data into a RAID-5-protected data pool. Now, any member of our production team can access the files with file-locking access from our Mac, Windows, and Linux machines.

We no longer waste time copying and transferring files, handing off work product from digital animators to video editors. This enables the creative team to collaborate, instantly accessing each other's work. Our IT staff can back up and restore files, add and subtract data storage, and administer access for our production team without downtime.

DigitalMix helped us determine our storage capacity and bandwidth requirements by specifying the number of simultaneous streams of SD and HD formats required to support each member of the creative team, including worst-case scenarios.

Since a SAN centralizes storage and bandwidth, we simply added up the numbers in the most demanding scenario to arrive at the total storage capacity and data bandwidth requirements to support our operation at full kilter. At this point, we were in a position to compare the costs for major pieces of equipment and software to build out a SAN in terms of dollars per gigabit and the required bandwidth to support our production pipeline.

It turns out that RAID controllers are a big factor determining overall initial cost and future costs to upgrade storage capacity. Essentially, RAID controllers are only compatible with a manufacturer-certified set of disk enclosures and drives. Within that, each is capable of handling a maximum number of simultaneous video streams before another controller is necessary. DigitalMix suggested the Dot Hill C4400 controller, since it's scalable when paired with inexpensive Xyratex RS1600 enclosures, each packing up to 16 off-the-shelf Seagate drives.

This setup can simultaneously deliver several HD streams and multiple SD streams, as well as random I/O requests from non-video streaming applications. We considered less expensive controllers with lower bandwidth, but the cost went through the roof when you consider that up to six of these would be needed to do the same job as one C4400. We also considered some of the more expensive high-bandwidth controllers, but the cost per gigabit of the supported enclosures and drives is two to three times the cost of the equivalent storage capacity of the Xyratex and Seagate combo.

We learned that deploying Fibre Channel switches with dedicated inter-switch links requires fewer switches, therefore costing less than deploying switches without dedicated inter-switch links. Unless the switches have dedicated inter-switch links, a number of data ports that otherwise could be used for connections to workstations and storage, must be used to accommodate data traffic between the switches.

We deployed two switches using two of the four 10Gb inter-switch links on each switch to create a 20Gb backbone. We currently use 30 of the 32 available data ports on the two switches to connect workstations and storage. Without inter-switch links, we would have required a third switch because at least 10 data ports would have been required to provide the equivalent bandwidth of the two 10Gb inter-switch links we currently use to accommodate traffic between the switches.

We installed one QLogic SANbox 5200 when we built the SAN; several months later, we scaled up our SAN capacity again by adding a QLogic 5602 switch. This newly released model has up to 16 4Gb ports in addition to four 10Gb inter-switch links. It's inexpensive and fully compatible with the 5200, and it has no single point of failure. This QLogic line of switches frees up all of the user ports for workstations and storage connections.

Next, we installed dual-channel Atto Fibre Channel cards in each computer attached to the SAN. The Atto card works in a heterogeneous OS environment, so we can use any of our Mac, Windows, or Linux computers, which protects our investment in the FC cards when the mix of machines changes.

Equally important as the hardware is a global file system, which enables consolidation of data- and file-level locking access among Mac, Windows, and Linux machines. With the release of Apple's Xsan software earlier this year, which is compatible with ADIC's StorNext file system, we have been able to build out a heterogeneous SAN that runs on the most cost-effective, off-the-shelf hardware available. The Apple/ADIC heterogeneous SAN solution is far more competitively priced than solutions built on expensive proprietary hardware with pricey support options.

Since our SAN has been up and running, we not only have been able to meet our TV client deadlines this season, we have a proven and cost-effective means of scaling up our data storage capacity to meet our production needs for future growth.

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Rich Shurtliff is CTO at Curious Pictures and is responsible for the setup and operation of the company's computer and video equipment.

Sang-Jin Bae is the technical director on Disney's animated TV series. Prior to working at Curious Pictures, Bae worked on several animated series at the Nickelodeon Digital Animation Studio, including the 2004 Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Series, Little Bill.

Curious Pictures, the largest animation studio in New York, produces award-winning animated television series and television commercials, as well as popular characters in picture books and television.

Using its multiple strengths in animation, design, production, and brand strategy, Curious has recently created successful branded entertainment for Mattel and AOL as well as commercials for American Express, Coke, Pepsi, Target, Steve Madden, Burger King, and Hummer. Visit www.curiouspictures.com for more information.

For more information on DigitalMix, call (516) 922-2221.

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