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MillimeterEdit Expertise: Storage Savings
Feb 18, 2009 12:00 PM, By Dan Ochiva
As the economy stalls, companies drop prices on storage and compression gear.
MicroNet
If you want to buy an off-the-shelf array, your choices for bargains continue to grow here too.
Storage vendors such as MicroNet are finding ways to build products less expensively to challenge even established lower-cost leaders such as CalDigit.
This past fall, MicroNet announced a lower-cost SAN that offers fast, block-level access to storage — an approach similar to how data reads and writes are handled in speedy FC-SAN arrays.
To keep costs down in its MaxNAS array, the Torrance, Calif.-based company replaces pricey FC components with less expensive, standardized Gigabit Ethernet. Its unified NAS/iSCSI storage solution — prices start at $1,349 for a 2.5TB unit — also consumes 35 percent less power than conventional file servers, says the company, by spinning down disk drives when not in use and incorporating an energy-efficient ultralow-voltage Intel processor.
Maxx Digital
The final option is to buy a completely configured storage system. That's right, leave the worrying about which parts work together to a value added reseller (VAR). Maxx Digital sells and supports Atto products along with its own line of Atto-connected RAID storage arrays. The Huntington Beach, Calif.-based VAR also sells and services edit systems and a range of production and post gear to freelancers and small to midsize facilities.
VARs study various combos of storage gear to see how well they work in deadline-stressed edit suites, so you're getting the benefit of reports from the trenches. “Many of our Atto sales are from repeat customers,” says Devon Cook, director of sales and marketing at Maxx Digital. “They've tried [Atto] products before and found them reliable. While Atto's [recently announced] 15-percent price reductions aren't game changers, every bit helps in this economy.”
Maxx Digital's inhouse-designed Final Share SAN has garnered interest among Apple Final Cut Pro editors; the entry-level turnkey system features a Mac Pro, 8TB of storage, low-cost Gigabit Ethernet (GE) card, and a GE switch. Software that enables port aggregation allows four users at a time to achieve 70MBps throughput for around $10,000, according to Cook.
“Simply put, Final Share allows Final Cut Pro users to edit ProRes 422 HQ, DVCPRO HD, and Red camera footage over an Ethernet shared-storage network for a fraction of the cost of Fibre Channel,” Cook says.
For those up to the challenge of creating their own storage gear, Cook recommends a column on building an affordable SAN by Maxx Digital's chief video engineer Bob Zelin. (see magazine.creativecow.net/article/build-your-own-affordable-san-that-iworksi).
Cloud on the horizon
Considering the state of the economy, the demand for storage has remained remarkably steady. But don't expect that to last, especially with alternatives to traditional storage on the horizon. While you won't use this to edit your video yet, one new Internet-based technology has taken off: virtualized storage, more popularly known as cloud storage. Today, tightening budgets that slash capital expenditures help fuel a growing interest in the type of storage that requires only a fast Internet connection. For a tiered usage charge, cloud storage allows access to storage on an as-needed basis — no upfront investment necessary.
Cloud storage businesses such as Nirvanix employ Amazon's S3, an open-structure, Internet-based storage service, to offer online storage and distribution (See digitalcontentproducer.com/storage/revfeat/cloud_you_1208). Nirvanix claims its Storage Delivery Network can save businesses 80 percent to 90 percent versus building and maintaining a storage solution.
But while your future storage might exist in the cloud, you can save money by checking out a sampling of more traditional storage companies that are knocking prices down to earth.
Let RAID be your bailout
Storage hardware doesn't appreciate your economic woes, so you really need to protect it with advanced RAID technology.
A chief trainer for Future Media Concepts, Jeffrey I. Greenberg knows both Avid and Apple NLE products well. After all, he's been a teacher and professional-level editor on film and video projects for over 14 years, so he's experienced myriad gotchas of both product lines. The ones he hasn't witnessed himself, he's heard about.
Greenberg has come to expect to hear one common complaint. "One thing that comes up again and again when I teach my courses on troubleshooting on the Avid and on Final Cut Pro, is that someone put their entire show on a hard drive and it crashes and everything is gone," he says.
He smiles and shakes his head. "In the best of worlds the originals are on tape and they just have to recapture. In the worst of situations, they have lost everything and they are panicking," he says. Greenberg recommends that when a production's source material reaches the 1-2TB range, you must find the money for a RAID 5 setup. "This much footage simply takes too much time to rebuild," he says. "You need something with redundancy so that when a drive dies, there is enough concurrent data on the other drives to rebuild that information.
"All hard drives die. I have a love-hate relationship with every hard drive manufacturer, because I've had one fail from each one of them. It's just the nature of these things, and the sooner you prepare for and expect it to happen, the better."
Another recommendation from Greenberg: Keep a workable backup system on a hard drive that's safely stored. "I have a hard drive with my [Mac OS X] system on it along with a copy of Final Cut Pro," Greenberg says. "If my main machine should die tomorrow, I can plug in this drive and be back at work within five minutes. I'll solve [the crash] later, but I need to be working now." —D.O.
Continue the discussion on Crosstalk the Millimeter Forum.