IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?

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IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Eric Lanouette on Apr 28, 2012 at 6:09:41 am

Quantum Stornext seems to be mainstream and widely used for video production storage but as the business I work for already own an IBM XIV Gen3 I could easily use it over iSCSI with our Macs, why would I choose to build an other SAN with a Stornext filesystem for our video needs?

We only use Macs with OSX 10.7 editing 1080p ProRes 422 file in FCPX. We also plan to sometimes use it for live ingest and editing a maximum of 4 SD feeds with Telestream Pipeline hardware. Our space need are low (10-15TB / year) because we already have an LTO-5 tape library for archiving content...

We need a storage system with maximum reliability and expandability avoiding compatibility and performances issues. The XIV is and will be use for other storage needs but it's not an issue to add 1 or 2 extra storage units to boost performances and storage space.

It's just about to get the best video storage system. What are your thoughts ?

Thank you,

Eric

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Juan Salvo on Apr 28, 2012 at 6:51:26 am

If you want reliability, compatibility & performance, I'd go with the system built in to the os. I'd also strongly recommend hiring an Xsan/stornext specialist to consult and advice on best practices. The paculiarities of video production are just that, and unique to video production. A system designed for general shared storage is not necessarily going to offer acceptable performance for video, and vice versa. There is lots of fine tuning for video that is done on stornext.

Ultimately the choice is yours, but I know of many, many shops (including mine) running Xsan successfully for post. I know of none using XIV. It doesn't sound like cost is an issue, and a good specialist can find ways to integrate your existing infrastructure, for example with regards to the archive, into your installation. So why risk it?

online editor | colorist | VFX | BD author

http://JuanSalvo.com

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Steve Modica on Apr 28, 2012 at 11:21:42 am

Download Small Tree stream counter app (http://www.small-tree.com/downloads_a/123.htm) and run it one or more of your clients to the storage and see how it does. We'll show you all the IO and the latency and you'll see if a bunch of them are falling out of the window.

The app currently emulates FCP 7, but we'll be adding FCPX emulation soon.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Nate Cooper on Apr 28, 2012 at 2:37:11 pm

There have been so many attempts to put in high availability enterprise storage (IBM, EMC, NetApp, etc, etc) and without fail, these installations have serious stability and performance issues for the video editors. For this reason I would stay away from the IBM XIV storage.

If you want I can put you in contact with a few clients that have tried this to hear their experience's.

That being said, if for budgetary or political reasons you have to use the IBM storage go get trial licenses of the Mac based iSCSI initiator and SANmp volume locking software at http://www.studionetworksolutions.com. If anything will make the IBM storage work for FCP users, that is it.

The simple issue though is that video production (even using ProRes/other lower bandwidth codecs) requires far more performance per user that any non-M&E platform offers.

Video creation is so niche you are always better off finding a video specific solution. Which there are lots of affordable and extremely highly available options depending on your needs and budgets.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Sebastien Bertrand on Apr 30, 2012 at 2:05:18 pm

Hello Eric,

Stornext is a hardware agnostic filesystem and IBM XIV is a hardware storage solution. Stornext allows several clients to share the same volume read/write at block level. You could very well run a Stornext file system on top of your IBM XIV/iSCSI and it would allow different editors to share the same LUN (given that the IBM storage can provide the bandwidth/low latency you need to edit video)

Sebastien Bertrand
Ordigraphe Inc.
Toronto, Canada
http://www.ordigraphe.com

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Eric Lanouette on May 1, 2012 at 12:08:45 am

Thank you guys for all the reply.

Like you, I'm not sold to the idea of using the XIV as a video production SAN...

You may not know it but the thing is a beast with sky rocking specs. Some call it the IBM Enterprise flagship SAN as it uses dual 20Gbps infiniband and dual 600Gbps Infiniband switches to interconnect each storage unit and the overall bandwidth can achieve 9.1Gbps reads / 6.8Gbps writes.

As it cost nothing, I will conduct some test with the XIV to see how it performs and what kind of latency I get.

I need to know what is the usual latency and acceptable limit on SAN used for video production storage. Is 17ms too high?

Eric

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Re: IBM XIV Gen3 or Stornext SAN?
by Jonathan Eason on May 18, 2012 at 10:10:00 pm

Hi Eric,

The latency limit is based on the type of work flow, either File Based (i.e. Frame Based) or streaming. For file based the calculation is simple. Just answer how many frames you want per second. At 24 fps you could not go over 41ms. Keep in mind this is a total value from request to delivery for the application and includes the entire i/o stack (i.e. application, storage, hardware drivers, operating system). Most applications will buffer and hopefully perform threaded requests which will keep you within acceptable limits. I would just benchmark from the client side to any shared volumes with single threaded i/o to establish the baseline. Just be sure that your benchmark tool can emulate your editing software otherwise your benchmarks are worthless.

Cheers,
Jonathan

"A Day of life spent learning nothing is a day of life wasted." ~ Anonymous

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