It was a very hot and sticky Sunday here in Atlanta today, but it was nice and cool inside the shop. A great day to install a brand new SAN. Steve Modica, Chris Duffy and I all met up bright and early at 8am to get a nice early jump on things. Turned out to be a good thing because we had to transfer almost 32TB of material from our original SAN.
Chris and Steve get to work removing the original switch. First test was to ensure that everything still worked with just changing out the switch. That’s a very important first step when you’re making a major change to your system involving multiple parts. When feasible, always test your system with each newly introduced part.
Steve Modica behind the rack checking the clearance for the new switch. Testing the new switch with the old SAN configuration was an easy first step. Then it came time to unpack the shiny goodness that is the Small Tree ST RAID II storage array. All 48TB of it, configured in RAID 4 which gives us about 38 TB of available storage space.
Installing the chassis. No, there are no drives in there, so it’s much lighter than it appears. Once the 16 drives are in there, then that thing gets super heavy. You can see our older 16TB RAID sitting up on its side to the left. This single 16 drive chassis replaces 32TB in two chassis. We’ll use the new 48TB for shared storage and keep one of the 16TB for direct connect to our Resolve system for super high speed 4k and higher playback.
Molly sitting outside The Core, apparently unimpressed with the shiny goodness going on inside. She would apparently rather we play with tennis balls. But I digress…..
Close-up view of the Small Tree ST RAID II
And here it is sitting above one of our older arrays. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. “Gee that looks exactly the same, so why go with Small Tree?” Ok, you’ll find that multiple vendors all use the same chassis, it’s a nice silver box that looks really nice sitting next to the Mac Pros. That’s probably why they all use them. BUT when I say they use the same chassis, that’s exactly what they use. The silver outer box and the drive sleds on the front. At least as far as Small Tree goes, that’s all they use that would be the same as other vendors. Once you get inside with the cards, the electronics and the setup, that’s all proprietary Small Tree and THAT’s where you get the difference between something that “looks the same” and something that operates completely different.
Same with the overall configuration of the entire Ethernet SAN, Small Tree are network experts who really took the concept to a new level and which is why I went with them to configure the entire system and added their storage to equation. The next step was to transfer one of the 16TB arrays to the new array because we needed to use the other for a rare Sunday edit.
While the transfer was going on, Steve and Chris went through our 6 primary workstations and 7 iMacs to configure all the network settings. They literally had dozens of configurations to set up to get the best combination of speed and stability for our system. Various configurations for the client workstations, the client iMacs and also the SAN computer itself.
5 hours later, the 16TB was finally transferred over to the SAN so we could start running some speed tests. Here Steve and Chris monitor the SAN while the workstations play video down. After several hours of tweaking and tuning, for the first time since we moved into the new facility, we had all 6 workstations and the four edit suite iMacs all playing video projects simultaneously. It felt great to finally get the full system up and running. By then it was 8:30pm and time to call it a day.
The best part? These guys have more ideas for further tuning tomorrow AND we seem to have discovered an interesting condition or maybe it’s a bug between older and newer Mac Pros. Will require more testing tomorrow, but we seem to be on to something interesting that really shouldn’t be happening.
So tomorrow will be full workday in the shop and these two will be massaging the system further. Tomorrow night I’ll give you all the technical details on our system configuration. We’ve been using Ethernet SAN for almost three years now and the evolution of this concept has come a long way in a short time.