Multi user video editing storage solution?

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

Soldato
Joined
1 Sep 2005
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Scottish Highlands
Hello,

Im currently trying to research ideas of how to deal with the storage of our video editing macs here at work. We currently have 4 Mac pros, 2 with 250Gb storage drives and 2 with 120Gb storage drive. all of them have an additional 20 Gb system drive.

The Macs are for the students to use Final Cut Pro and iDVD to do video editing. At present we assign a machine to a group when they start a project, they then have to stick to this machine throughout their project, and are themselves responsible for booking time on this machine. Now this works fine most of the time, except sometimes we will end up with a couple of the machines not being used, and a couple of them being in demand as some groups work faster than others.

My ideal solution to this would be to have a central NAS system where all the work is stored. The students could them jump on any available machine and access their work. The only downsides to this are the potential cost, and also the speed of the system needed to be able to handle at least 4 real time video editing systems, with potentially more in the future.

So does anyone know how this is handled in industry, or have any relatively low cost solutions or ideas?
 
messiah khan said:
So does anyone know how this is handled in industry, or have any relatively low cost solutions or ideas?
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Enterprise scale databases aren't drastically different in their disk usage to video editing, both are very I/O intensive although databases tend to be a bit more random in their access patterns but there are times when sustained access is required - table scanning, reorgs, backups etc. For terrabyte scale systems we use a SAN environment, either shared or dedicated depending on the client's budget and location. The problem though is that it's not cheap, I'm not sure of exact numbers but high six / low seven figures is probably a good starting point. What you can get however are sustained data rates in excess of 400Mb/s even from a shared environment.
 
Thanks rpstewart. A SAN setup sounds good, but it would be far to expensive for our requirments im afraid. I would be looking at probably >£5000. We are a college of ~160 staff and ~1700 students, so a full Enterprise scale SAN setup would be overkill, especially as this storage would only be handling the 4 or so video editing systems.
 
Agreed, a SAN would suit you down to the ground but for that many folk it's just not feasible.

What about an eSATA solution where rather than booking a machine the students could book a drive and then plug it onto whichever machine is free?
 
But then you have the same problem. Two or more groups could want to use the same drive at the same time. Im basically wanting a setup where a student can pick any machine, and carry on where they left from.

Edit; And we currently own a few removable hardrives that connect via firewire to transfer projects if we need to, and to back old work up.
 
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