The storage needs of video and postproduction house, Digital Pictures (DP), increased to almost unmanageable levels with the migration of traditional film and videotape to digital format. The company has about 120 people in Melbourne and about 90 in Sydney.
"We do television commercials and film and everything in between," says Digital Pictures’ IT manager, Ron Korpi.
"There’s a big move on to store all images and films as digital, rather than just the original film negative, and that’s leading to huge growth in our storage requirements."
Korpi says the average film is about 1.5TB in size and he has to keep multiple copies of that film, storing the original version and then a number of revision copies as well.
As if that was not taxing enough on storage infrastructure, Korpi says there is now a new process called ‘digital intermediate grading’, which means grading the whole film from top to bottom by the colourists so it can be tweaked at any time to change the look.
"We’d historically run between 4TB and 8TB of storage, which would be pretty normal for us for a year, but now we’ve almost tripled that in one year, and will triple that again by the end of this year. It’s been driven by the move to digital processing," Korpi says.
"Technology changes are rapid. The last time DP did a film there weren’t any fibre channel SATA drives at all," Korpi says. It was old ATA sets and they were SCSI-based. "Compared to what we have to choose from now, it was absolutely dreadful. It was typically 2TB of storage on 20 servers. Now it’s 10TB onto one server and for this film coming up, we’ll probably put 30 plus TB onto one server.
"Now that storage is becoming much more cost effective we can afford to do fibre channel to fibre channel [links]," he says.
"Fibre channel to fibre channel [FC:FC] has very minimal degradation whether 50 people hit on our network drive or 100 people hit it, whereas SATA goes down slightly in performance every time somebody accesses it," he says.
SMBs are often strapped for good storage options within their price range because when you’re down the pecking order, you lose most of the big players.
Korpi says the biggest discriminator right now in the different storage vendors is their ability to scale from small to large. "When you’re an SMB you’ve got to start somewhere. Our first one was a 2TB startup disk array. You’re not going to get the board to say, 'Yeah this month you can go out and spend $500,000 on disks', because I think it’s a good idea.They’re going to say, 'Get as much as you can for as little as you can'."
Costs are a big ask, that is why a lot of people now are getting sucked into the FC: SATA solution just because it looks so affordable, he says. "But when you really look at the kind of performance you’re going to get out of that in a rigorous network, the SATA drives just won’t live up to that sort of performance demand." The fix
Digital Pictures’ IT provider is Sydney-based SLI Consulting, which specialises in storage, logistics and information management. SLI’s principle, José Goldmann, says a lot of SMBs face scare tactics from storage spruikers.
"People throw acronyms at them and some business owners get completely confused by technology and jargon and feel intimidated. In the end they just want something that’s effective, that addresses their business needs and can grow with the business dynamics," Goldmann says.
When faced with some of those acronyms -- NAS, SAN, SCSI, FC -- Korpi took his time choosing what was best for the company and admits it is often a long, drawn out process.
"The real key is being able to test it out before purchasing it. Right now drive technology is changing so rapidly that unless you know your specific use for something, it’s really hard to say what you actually need," Korpi says.
"A drive manufacturer might come in and say, 'I’ve got this disk array that’s whizzbang and does XYZ', and that might not fit my environment at all. I need to store a lot of data, move large bulk data rather than lots of small, intensive data. My file sizes are between 13MB to 20MB per file. A lot of disk manufacturers have a hard time with that because the history of disks is to chase database performance."
Korpi says SLI understands DP’s unusual needs and has been very generous in allowing him to test different things to find a solution to fit.
"I tend to get disks in for up to two weeks to actually try them out in our environment. We mimic the way our network traffic talks to the arrays ...we set up a test server and start throwing traffic at it, so we can see what kind of performance we’d get."
That is how he decided to stick with the FC:FC disk arrays because he found there was still nothing like them for performance in a big, heavy network.
"The whole SATA specification was supposed to mimic what the traditional SCSI environment did but the SATA spec never really lived up to that. We’ve fallen back to FC:FC for anything we consider to be high performance."
He went with a disk array system from Xyratex. "One of the things I like about SLI and their disk array system from Xyratex is that it actually includes the RAID controllers in the disk chassis itself. So when you buy the RAID controllers you don’t have to then buy another chassis to hold the disks."
Issue: 281 | July