Hello Sysadmins!
I work for a TV production company that makes kids shows,
and we are creating far more media than we know what to do
with. This year we will create ~300TB of new data (mostly R3D
footage). We have been using an old home brew server for our
POST department, which has worked reasonably well for the last
6 years. It has 400TB of usable space, and is a simple NAS
serving data over AFP to our clients. Some of the data is
backed up onto LTO5 tapes, some on to bare archive drives,
some onto a nearline server. The data is every where and we
want to consolidate.
We are in the market for a new solution, ideally one that
is all encompassing, primary disk, and tape archive. We
initially looked simply at tape archive, but decided we needed
a refresh on the disk side as well. In an ideal world, we
would buy new primary disk, with an attached LTO6 library,
that could move data back and forth as needed, and convert our
old server to be nearline/DR.
So far we have seen proposals and configs from Oracle
(DIVA), Quantum, Editshare, CatDV, Qstar, Archiware.
They all look interesting, but obviously quite expensive.
What we are looking for:
- 100-200TB of usable disk
- 2GB/s of throughput from disk, 275MB/s for single
largest stream
- 200TB of tape
- 16 craft editors, 5 online editors
- active archive scenario, where data moves from disk to
tape in a semi-automated way
- ability to backup other NAS appliances
- LTFS, ideally
I have spoken with a few shops here in Toronto, and it
seems we are in a bit of a unique situation than most, in
that we have the opportunity to buy from the ground up,
almost as if we were starting as a brand new company. We
have seem many implantations of different tech, which
bridges legacy systems, because a) so much data is already
archived using product x, or b) too much money has been
invested for a fork lift upgrade.
One key requirement that I seem to be stuck on, is if we
buy disk and archive, from the same vendor, then we have to
stage the data on the new disk. This seems to happen because
I have 'active archive' as a key requirement, so the archive
software needs greater integration with the disk. I would
love to point the archive system at another NAS, and backup as
needed.
From a work flow perspective, ideally the footage would
come in, be copied to the server, which would then make a
proxy (MAM or external conversion), archive R3D footage to
tape. Then when we are ready for the online stage, the R3D
footage would come back to disk (MAM, manual, or active
archive software).
If you use any of these products, or are in a similar boat,
then please share your experiences. I'll follow up with a
post about some of the proposals, and pro's and con's that I
see.