Workstation Configurations - Discussion

[Felipe Abreu]

Thanks Blair!!! great product!! Where do you recommend me to purchase from?

Thanks!

Felipe

[Dustin Cross]

Felipe,

You can also check out the Cyclone 600-2707.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=49472


Dusty

[Chris Ratledge]

I've seen some of the more heavy hitters in the past, with photos of their very impressive looking large carts on the bbs. Dustin and Brook's come to mind immediately.

I'm curious how people run a two-mac setup on a single cart, with a single, big RAID array shared between the two? Couldn’t really find anything covering this in my search of the board. My IT karate is white or orange belt at best, so wrapping my head around the stuff I unearth just trying to figure this out on my own has me drowning in alphabet soup.

What are the configurations running this? RAID in a server configuration and the two machines are clients? RAID hosted with one machine and the two connected via GBe or 10GBe ethernet? Caldigit now has the "SuperShare" hardware PCIe hardware which may be up to the task but overkill for only two machines? FibreChannel? Are all possible merely limited only by your wallet? I would certainly want the most bang for my buck, the less buck the better.

In Brook’s blog post photo it appears to me, and I could be very wrong, that there’s a small GBe switch just below the RAID with a red and green wire coming out???

Blog Post Link

The real advantage I’m seeing (even though I know this will be poo-pooed by many here) is that instead of sinking thousands of dollars into a PCIe expansion chassis, where I still have to shoehorn all the peripherals into the MacPro’s 40/4 Lanes/Slots, why not sink that money into a kick-ass HacPro based on a MoBo like the SL-2, which comes with 7 16x slots, and network the two machines together to both access the RAID, and pilot it all from a single common Keyboard/Monitor/Mouse? - unless it’s not up to the task or just STUPID expensive to build the network. That way I would have more than enough Lanes and PCIe slots for pretty much everything I would think.

Could I not divide up the duties pretty easily between the two machines, with one of them hosting the RAID controller? If I had a 12TB (12 spindle) RAID 5/6 that let’s say was getting 500Mbs on the host machine, what kind of death blow to the throughput would I have networking them over say, 10GBe for example? If I had the RAID hosted on one machine and the Rocket on the other, would my transcode speed drop down to next to nothing? Do I really even NEED both machines to read/write @ 500Mbs?

I’ve asked this and many questions in this realm in further detail to all the IT/network people I know, but I think they may be too busy pwning noobs to ever try to explain it to me, which would probably take longer than they’d want. Just curious if anyone here would be willing to share their experiences with this. Or are these trade secrets????

[AnthonyFlores]

This is a place to discuss various configurations for workstations used in your RED workflows. Benchmarks, hardware choices, etc..

Jeff, since your knowledge of Apple technology is so vast, I'm curious what
you thought about this setup as a mobile editing platform:

- Macbook Pro 17/3.06ghz/8gb (currently have 1 x 128 SSD, but about to remove superdrive and upgrade to dual 480gb SSD's from OWC)
- RedRocket/Mobile Rocket
- EvoVR 8TB from MaxxDigital for storage
- Matrox MXO2
- HP DreamColor 24"

Obviously, I know this is not the "ultimate" setup, but for mobile and
budget purposes it seems to cover the bases. Thoughts?

Thanks!

Anthony

[Bob Gruen]

...The real advantage I’m seeing (even though I know this will be poo-pooed by many here) is that instead of sinking thousands of dollars into a PCIe expansion chassis, where I still have to shoehorn all the peripherals into the MacPro’s 40/4 Lanes/Slots, why not sink that money into a kick-ass HacPro based on a MoBo like the SL-2, which comes with 7 16x slots, and network the two machines together to both access the RAID, and pilot it all from a single common Keyboard/Monitor/Mouse?...

...If I had the RAID hosted on one machine and the Rocket on the other, would my transcode speed drop down to next to nothing? Do I really even NEED both machines to read/write @ 500Mbs?...

Hackintoshs are very tricky to build, and you should want to spend your time making movies and not beating on a computer. That being said you are only looking for file services from the 2nd computer so it doesn't have to be a Mac at all. You could do Windows or Linux (look up FreeNAS) and end up with a much more stable configuration. You could also just buy a prebuilt NAS Server from a vendor like QNAP.

You can connect the computers to each other using an Ethernet crossover cable at 1Gb/s or get a managed switch to gang/team them at 2Gb/s. The upshot of this is that you are freeing up one slot by swapping your mass storage controller card (whatever it may be) for an Ethernet connection.

The last thing to consider is the true storage limits of a Mac Pro, which is not as simple as some people think. I can get 6 internal disks in my late 2008 model without loosing an optical drive (there are two 'hidden' sata ports on the MOBO). The newer macs switched the optical drives to those sata ports, so for them it would be a straight HD for DVD drive swap. The question becomes: how much disk space do you have to take on location? The answer to which depends on what services you think you can sell to producers.

Bob

[Dustin Cross]

Chris,

The best way to connect those two Macs would be 10gig Ethernet. Cards from Small Tree work great. But then you start filling up your limited PCIe.

You can use the onboard 1gig Ethernet so you don't have to add any extra cards. That will work just fine. You can push about 100MBytes/sec across AFP on GIGe and that is enough for most stuff. Downloading, rendering.

I have been considering building a Hachintosh as a second system on my cart mostly as a backup incase something happens to my primary system.

The way I have my PCIe expander set up it also houses my RAID and my LTO4. That space is going to be used on the cart anyway. Adding the PCIe expander makes it more useful. And the Cyclone I got is only $2500. Plus we use a lot of cards that don't saturate the slot they are in. So I can fill my expander with cards that don't use the bandwidth of a single PCIe x16 v2 slot.


Dusty

[Chris Ratledge]

I think I've abandoned the dual-mac setup for now.

Dustin thanks for the info, Your expander is sweet, and I totally see how you're using the lesser speed cards to utilize the whole 16x slot. That's the way to go.

I'm just looking at the cost/benefit. I could build a hell of a machine for $2500.

[Dustin Cross]

Chris,

I totally understand. I think about building a Hackintosh all the time. I have been building custom systems for almost 20 years and worked on everything from desktops to super computers and massive storage arrays, so I have the knowledge. When I am on set I don't have time to fiddle with things and it is nice to know that if I buy Apple, it just works.

A lot also depends on your market. My market in Texas is pretty low, so I only get $500/day for my cart and still get producers who only want someone with a laptop. But I easily pay for the Cyclone in one week of work and it makes my life easier.


Dusty

[Subhadip Sen]

Here's some pretty huge news for anyone looking for Quadro GPUs. Some of them cost half the price now. Yes, 50% discount. http://www.tweaktown.com/news/17259/...cts/index.html. No one can really explain why, but it doesn't matter. Anyone looking to buy a latest Quadro card, now's the time.

Also, GTX 460 1 GB is down to $199. GTX 470 down to $259. That's bargain pricing right there. The new AMD cards run circles round Nvidia for gaming, so they have no choice but to execute massive price cuts. Luckily, for CUDA users, this is just a great bargain. Until CS5 and the like support GPU acceleration on AMD cards, that is.

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

It's about striking a balance. Raid 0 is the best for high performance, but if you have a large enough raid (16 tb) you can get very high performance with a more redundant raid level like 5/6 that offers some hot swap-ablity.

In general terms... the faster the spindles and the more spindles you have, the higher your bandwidth. It all depends on how many streams you need at once. I work off a SAN, 16 drive (16x1TB 7200 RPM) chasis on a 8 Gbps fiber network and it's stupid fast. It serves 5 edit systems and more animators.

However I can get close to the same video frame rates from a JBOD raid I built myself 4 years ago... that was a Ultra 320 SCSI two channel direct attached (via UL4D) 4 drive enclosure with 15,000 rpm drives... but I was getting 2 streams, one user.

Either way it's about backing up your original assets and your project created files. True backups and clones are the best way to have redundancy because with raid there are always variables.

*ps: I can't wait for SSD raids... talk about the bleeding edge.

Raid 50 Rules for speed and Redundancy. You get the Speed of Raid 0 and the safety of Raid 5. get a good controller and you could be pushing 1.2 GB per second.