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This topic comprises 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Author
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Topic: I have crossed over to the Dark Side...My first D-Cinema install
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Joe Elliott
Master Film Handler
Posts: 497
From: Port Orange, Fl USA
Registered: Oct 2006
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posted 01-10-2012 11:35 PM
quote: Brad Miller
I will take your word on GDC making cinema servers longer than Dolby. The reason I believed otherwise was because a GDC tech told me last summer that their servers were only introduced into the field about 3 years ago
Remember, GDC had those orange and purple monsters out 8 years ago. They are supposed to be able to play 2k content with updates, but I have not run into any theaters that have been running them. The 10 to 15 minute boot up time of those old machines is just too much.
As for the GDC ingest, no I haven't seen that. It may be likely in a case like that, that one of the hard drives may be bad, and not identified by the system yet. I have seen that happen on both GDC and Dolby, tiling and freezing when doing something that should not interfere with playback, but does. Send the logs to GDC/Dolby and voila . . . they find signs of a failing drive that was not identified by the system. I would imagine, that there are similar problems with Doremi, but I don't have any in Doremi's in my market that I service, so I can't speak on that. That seems more like a general fault of the RAID, not the operating system or manufacturer.
Personally, I far prefer the GDC's to Dolby's. That may be prejudiced by the fact that most of the Dolby's that I service are DSS100's, not 200's.
quote: Brad Miller
Regardless, as a result of GDC's design, I have a firm policy that no GDC server will leave our shop before we have made (and tested) an image of the drive and mounted it in an empty space inside the server. This is because we don't want our customers to get screwed when that OS drive fails.
I agree, that actually should be added to the GDC firmware period. Having it back up it's on OS drive should be done automatically. However, I have had an OS drive fail on (luckily) Thursday. (New movie, and the server wouldn't ingest, rebooted, and the OS drive wouldn't boot at all) I contacted them at 9pm on Thursday, and it came it at 9:30am Friday, I restored the config, tested and the theater live-played the 11:00, and ingested it between the next shows. Overnight works as well on Saturday, as it does on Friday. However, to be fair, with your solution, I would think you could even steal one of the Raid drives, and drop the OS image on it, then just replace the Raid drive when a new drive comes in.
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Brad Miller
Administrator
Posts: 17775
From: Plano, TX (36.2 miles NW of Rockwall)
Registered: May 99
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posted 01-11-2012 03:10 AM
quote: Mike Blakesley
No problems, but it slows to a crawl. A feature will normally ingest in about 20 minutes but if you start it at the beginning of a show, it'll be at about 40 to 50% by the end of that show.
quote: Joe Elliott
As for the GDC ingest, no I haven't seen that.
Both of the comments above is the behavior I expected. Every server will slow down a bit, some perhaps more than others, to protect playback. I would have to play the same file on each server while trying to ingest the same content to each from a dedicated source doing nothing else to see if one was noticeably faster than another. Still though it is good to see you guys can ingest during a movie without disrupting playback. We have to do our ingestions after hours because these just can't do it without the playback stuttering.
quote: Joe Elliott
It may be likely in a case like that, that one of the hard drives may be bad, and not identified by the system yet.
I'm with Joe, it could very well be a bad drive in the raid...but all of the servers? I guess since they were all essentially sequential serial numbers there could've been a bad batch of hard drives (or maybe somebody dropped the case of drives and did a slight amount of damage to them). I am going to make a trip to the site myself to test it after hours and get a better grasp on what the limitations are and what must be done to resolve it. For now, we are simply refraining from ingesting during playback.
quote: Joe Elliott
Personally, I far prefer the GDC's to Dolby's. That may be prejudiced by the fact that most of the Dolby's that I service are DSS100's, not 200's.
Joe, I don't think comparing what is essentially a series 1 era unit to a series 2 unit is fair at all. Case in point, I don't compare a DCP2K4 or a DSS200 to the "GDC orange and purple monsters" you speak of. It simply isn't a fair comparison.
quote: Joe Elliott
I would think you could even steal one of the Raid drives, and drop the OS image on it, then just replace the Raid drive when a new drive comes in.
Again, each OS drive is specific to THAT machine on a GDC. If only the scenario was that easy. Fortunately your time zone and failure date saved your entire weekend from being down.
This is where the Dolby really shines above all the others. First off a hard drive wouldn't have knocked you off the screen at all...but let's say you had TWO hard drives fail (unlikely, but let's just say it happened). You could run down to a local store, purchase a couple of drives, pop them in, drop the install cd into the tray and 15 minutes later you would have a freshly loaded machine just as if it was brand new. I've even done the theoretical test of not being able to find a matching drive by putting a mix and match of drives in a Dolby and running an install disc. It doesn't care. It just works. (Obviously you should always keep the hard drives identical in the raid, but I'm 99% sure there exists no other D-cinema server that can boast that.) The cd auto-install disc is an AWESOME feature which was well thought out when the server was designed. Still though, one dead drive won't even knock you off screen.
If you have a failure of the OS chip in a Doremi and you have a spare, you can swap them out too. The nice part about the Doremi OS chips is that one-size-fits-all. They aren't serial specific, so you're well covered if you have a spare in the building.
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