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This topic comprises 3 pages: 1 2 3
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Author
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Topic: 'Standalone' IMS Rack
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-14-2017 02:13 AM
We're now in the realm where 10GE is becoming pretty affordable, especially given the budget of your average multiplex installs. For average 2K content, there is no need yet for 10GE, 1GE will do just fine, but we're slowly moving into a world were we will see content that challenges the 250 MBps limit of DCI. If you're looking at MJPEG2000 content at 4K and 60 fps, you're easily running into 500 MBps+ and beyond. Since doing storage over Ethernet involves all kind of overhead, you don't want to be running this over 1GE. Also, 10GE could give you a major advantage on ingest times over the network, especially when the local drives in the IMSes get replaced by SSDs and those disks are no longer a limiting factor. Also, with shorter ingest times, having smaller local disks, isn't such a problem anymore.
Not that I'm a big fan of centralizing storage for the obvious reasons of reliability, but you can clearly see that this is where it's heading. Modern storage systems are easily capable of pushing out the required bandwidth for 10 screens or more.
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Steve Guttag
We forgot the crackers Gromit!!!
Posts: 12814
From: Annapolis, MD
Registered: Dec 1999
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posted 09-14-2017 07:42 AM
Long term, I see fiber is the end-game solution for moving data. It doesn't have the length limit of copper, it is a reliable connection, inherently isolated, and tons of bandwidth.
I agree, long term, it is going to a more centralized storage for content (and even those are going to shrink in size too, with technology. Heck, we have large spinning disc hard drives now to the point I think RAID-5/6/50 solutions will be unnecessary. Why not mirror up a couple of 10GB HDD rather than make 10GB out of several smaller drives? The drive capacity is only going to grow and move more and more to solid-state. But at the other end, projectors are going to turn into just screens so imagine your storage system where it is convenient, yet reliable with a fiber run to the screen.
As far as the PDP, no thanks. I'm not at all jazzed about using 2.5" HDD. They are laptop drives by nature and even the "Enterprise" versions are not as reliable as the standard 3.5" drives. I'd use an Enterprise Plus unit over a PDP every time.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 09-14-2017 09:07 AM
quote: Steve Guttag
Leo (not picking on you but you brought it up)...why would you even suggest using small storage locally in your described scenario? A problem my customers have to contend with is CONSTANTLY having to move, delete content to make room for new content. The smaller you make local storage the less flexibility a plex has on moving titles around based on actual customer turn-out. 2TB systems (total capacity) have proven to be a nuisance to my customers whereas 3TB seems to be the tipping point where they have sufficient storage to not worry about constantly deleting old stuff to make room for incoming stuff. Only my festival venues have expressed desires above 6TB total local storage.
I suppose that if a 10-plex wants to ingest all the week's features (let's say 12, factoring in a couple of one-off weekend matinees) into all 10 local servers to enable an instantaneous change of screen, then yes, 3TB of local storage would be necessary. Haven't (yet) seen anywhere that does this, though.
Agreed on the likely obsolescence of RAID5 approaches. 10TB enterprise grade drives now have a street price of about $500, so two of those will cost around the same as six 2TB ones (equivalent RAID5 capacity), and save significant power over, say, a typical five years of being spun up.
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Leslie Hartmier
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 100
From: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Registered: Jul 2012
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posted 09-15-2017 02:45 PM
RAID's arguable primary purpose for cinema servers might be increase of space, but no less important is the redundancy. One drive croaks, no content is lost, and overnight rebuilds returns the system to a state of health. If space was the primary purpose, they would have only gone with RAID 0, which would have been cheaper by a LOT, and far less overhead processing cost.
Using an Ironwolf 10Tb is great, but nothing makes you angrier than to have to reingest 10Tb of stuff because you have lost your drive, and frankly, larger storage past a certain size just means that the location is likely to get in the habit of not doing content housekeeping.
Leslie
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 09-15-2017 08:43 PM
Software RAID works well, if the machine you're using it with, does nothing else but storage. If you build a dedicated NAS using some open source or commercial NAS distribution and you're using somewhat recent hardware, you'll most likely even see better performance from it than from a comparable "all-hardware" solution.
The problem is though, a playout machine has all kinds of other things going on and that's what making things challenging. Also, most software RAID implementations suffer the same problem as hardware RAID implementations: They're usually not optimized for throughput, but for reliability.
The danger of random freezes due to a single drive problem is usually larger with software RAID than with hardware RAID. The reason for this is, because the software doesn't have as low level access as the RAID controller. In some cases, a disk which is causing timeouts, causes lockups on the whole SATA bus for example, which is entirely out of reach for the OS, which is handling the RAID layer.
There is also an inherent problem with software RAID1, especially if you're booting from it. The reason is that because when one disk gets dropped, it often doesn't mean it's entirely gone. So, if it was your primary boot disk that got dropped and you reboot the system, there's a chance you're booting from the disk that contains old and sometimes even corrupted data.
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