We are currently looking into upgrading our unity as we need HD storage. We are running 2 PC Nitris DX's, and 4 meridians. What are you guys out there using successfully for HD Unity Storage, and how many clients can run 2 streams simultaneously? We are currently running unity 4.16.

Thank you for your help, Hector

For HD, we use TerraBlock.  We have 8 x 24D's for a total of 120TB's.  Working through a Q-Logic 9000 Series switch, I can have as many as 12 x 4:4:4 clients running simultaneously, all on RAID-5 volumes.  We have 3 x DS Nitris/DS Assist, 1 x FCP, 4 x Clipster/Pronto, 2 x Nucoda, and 2 x DRS.  No dropped frames ...

If you are running DNXHD,  a 4 GIG Unity will handle this just fine.   

JDS

I run SANmp from SNS on a bunch of seats out here. Just did an upres on an uncompressed HD project and it's fine. It's volume based like terrablock but it's solid.

Folks like Unity for the project sharing so I'll be interested to see what Avid comes up with for the HD world, uncompressed I mean. But any of the volume based sans work well and if you use SANmp, you can choose from a ton of raids so if you own a box already, you can share it.

Thank you for your help. How many streams of dnx on how many different machines would you think that a 4gig unity could handle. We are currently testing an Archion HD system, and are having issues running 2 systems with 2 streams at the same time.

Hector

Number of Streams per Client is calculated by the number of Drives Span together and work as one (One Allocation Group).

Think about it,

~66 Mbps / Drive x <Number of Drives> = Total Mbps / 1024 = Total MBps

Also another thing to think about is Random Read vs Sequencial Read. Try to analyze what really happens to the drive once you press "Play" on one client.

P.S. i have 2 Archion HD on one of my Unity Server, which we are removing because we can't group it as one allocation group with the XTs

I'm not surprised you're having issues.

3 LP chassis in a 4GB config using 4.2 gives me support for about 2.5 streams  of DNX per client in a 10 client environment.   If you look at Unity 5,  you'll get even better performance, tho with a reduction in redundancy.

The Media Composers will only handle really 2 streams of DNX themselves,  so this gives me quite a bit of headroom bandwidth wise.

Hey,

So if I read what you wrote correctly, you can have 10 clients with 2.5 streams playing of the same unity! what resolution are you getting ? and also what are you defining as 0.5 of a stream?

We did a test with 2 Archion chassis outputting 2 streams at 220x and when we scrolled through an 4:1m offline seq on the same drive set one of the Nitris's fell over.

Thats not good right..

H

I'm also very curious what resolution you're playing--and if you're talking green/green, yellow/green or yellow/yellow.

~H

Hey Doc, so after many more tests this is our current testing config that we are still having problems with.

Currently we are running Unity Ver 4.1.6 with 5 Meridians, 1 Nitris Symphony DS, 1 Nitris Symphony DX and QLogic 5600 switch.  Our Unity has one set of drives for offline and another for HD media. The HD Drives are 2x8 TB Archion Chassis.  When we are attempting to play out of either Nitris while the another is rendering or whilst playing out or digitzing at the same time, they will continually drop frames.  All HD Resolutions are at 220x, we have local storage on the Nitris DS for 1.1 10b.

We have been trouble shooting the hell out of it but still keep on having the same playback/dropped frames issues on a daily basis.

I would love to know your thoughts if you could see any obvious problems?

Thanks

H