Mediavault 4440 - vPODs onsite recording
by dan graetz
on
Jan 7, 2007 at 9:34:49 pm
Just trying to understand the architecture of the 4440 a bit better. A few questions I couldn't find answers to in the available info:
Can the vPODs be written to standalone or do they need to be in the enclosure?
If shooting with a camera that has an FC output - is it necessary to have the entire enclosure on site? And if so, will there be anyway in the future to record direct to the 4440 without needing an NLE present?
With a fully populated 4440 - are there 8 x 4GB FC connections to the switch?
Is it possible to run the 4440 with two NLEs without a FC switch (using MetaSAN or similar)?
Re: Mediavault 4440 - vPODs onsite recording by Lance R. Gropper on Jan 8, 2007 at 3:28:39 pm
Hello Dan:
Here's the answers to your questions:
{Can the vPODs be written to standalone or do they need to be in the enclosure?}
They need to be in the enclosure, because the power supplies are in the enclosure...
{If shooting with a camera that has an FC output - is it necessary to have the entire enclosure on site?}
Yes, and what camera has an FC output?
{And if so, will there be anyway in the future to record direct to the 4440 without needing an NLE present?}
No -- we currently only make storage.
{With a fully populated 4440 - are there 8 x 4GB FC connections to the switch?}
No, there are 4 x 4GB FC connections to the switch - one per vpod
{Is it possible to run the 4440 with two NLEs without a FC switch (using MetaSAN or similar)?}
Yes and no. You can direct-attach the 4440 to one computer, then using server software, share it over Gig-E. Otherwise you'd need a Switch and MetaSAN or similar.
Re: Mediavault 4440 - vPODs onsite recording by Lance R. Gropper on Jan 8, 2007 at 4:16:44 pm
Hello Dan:
With regards to the lower-bandwidth, individual systems - certainly. The 4440 is (aside from drives and RAID 6), (4) 4110's in one chassis. The Chassis is only for LEDs and power, with each pod otherwise acting as a separate array. There are two power supplies (non-redundant). One power supply powers the upper two pods, and the other powers the lower two pods. As far as daisy-chaining goes, you noticed there there are 8 fibre ports on the back of the 4440 -- You can do several things with the "2nd" port. You can daisy-chain them to other vpods (as long as you aren't forming a loop). So one application of this might be if someone has a dual-channel card instead of a quad-channel card, they could still connect all 4 pods of the 4440 by daisychaining pairs of them together then connecting them to the computer. Note that this will NOT give the same performance as being attached to a 4 channel card. Because the vPODs are very close to saturating the 4GBit bus, you won't get much in terms of speed out of daisy-chaining -- it's only a connectivity thing. Similarly, if you have a single-channel card, you can daisy-chain all of the channels (both of these examples are provided you have SFPs enough to go around), to one channel on the card -- you wouldn't get more performance than that one channel, but would have the array attached. Now keep in mind, you can use RAID 6 on the 4440, and this applies separately to each pod. So you could have up to 2 drives fail in each pod and still be up and running (This is as opposed to a single 40-drive RAID 6 array, where only 2 drives out of 40 could fail).
If the Red camera will be Fibre channel, then you may not need the NLE -- they may have built something into the camera to do the capture/disk interfacing.
