Re: Terrablock upgrades or jump ship to MetaSAN?

[Nate Cooper] "What exactly doesn't work for your volume based workflow with CatDV? Have you talked to anyone at Squarebox about it? I've seen many users be very happy with CatDV in volume locking SANs."

Thanks Nate.
We have an ingest station, suites, and producer macbooks.
The ingest station has it's own read/write volume. All P2, SxS, and CF cards are copied to a RAW folder on the ingest volume, then converted to Quicktime. The ingest volume is shared out over the network and the producers and prediators can log from their own desks in CAT DV (5 users total). The new file names are updated in finder.

The producers can read from the shared network volume and make rough cuts in FCP. As you can imagine, performance varies. Everyone could take a reader to their desk and ingest but that's more time consuming and harder to archive. Depending on performance, sometimes users copy the footage through the network, log locally, then copy back to Terrablock. But hat's time consuming too.

It's nice to ingest immediately to the Terrablock because of RAID protection. RAW and converted files are archived to nearline. When on nearline, I have to reconnect the files to CAT DV because all footage can and will be reused in future projects. This is our growing stock footage collection which is the main reason for CAT DV.

If we went with MetaSAN, it would be nice to have the footage all online instead of moving it from online to nearline then back to online. And all files would be converted, logged, and kept in the same place until they would be moved into deep storage.

The shared volume over the network is new workflow for us. Although it’s a cool idea, it’s not ideal and this is why I’m looking into file level.


[Nate Cooper] " now the GigE side of File Locking is working,"

I would be satisfied with that, although it's a steep price just for GigE. Right now we all multitask and do not have a dedicated media wrangler. Making things simple is important.

My VAR would do the MetaSAN install. The Xserve would be the controller. If it works well when properly configured then this might be a good solution for us.

-dMR