Hi,
Got a bit of an advanced question here, but I found another thread on this site that makes me hopeful I can learn some useful stuff.
Background:
Our video production business is growing rapidly and in desperate need of a NAS upgrade. In addition to running out of disk space, 1Gbps (albeit bonded) wasn't enough when the business started, and it's just ridiculously slow now where 1TB projects are concerned. Fortunately prices for 10Gbe are finally becoming reasonable lately thanks to Aquantia and Netgear.
I also recently set up a Windows 2016 server as a test, and it's proving to have a range of benefits, so it occurred to me that rather than buy another proprietary NAS, I could just put the drives in the server and use Storage Spaces to set up a high performance RAID (keeping the old one as the nightly backup). The benefits of doing so (cheap, custom and replaceable hardware, no-fuss user authentication) seem great.
Now, we use Premiere Pro mostly, and while in the past it was terrible at operating over a network, Adobe have since improved that. However, as SSDs greatly improved in size and pricing it made much more sense to just operate off local copies of the projects on a high performance drive and upload them to the NAS when done (or sync them in the background).
The Problem:
With 4K footage now being common, we now face the issue of SSDs once again being very pricey to have the capacity we require for local editing (2TB), especially in m.2 format. While merely upgrading to a 10Gbe environment will no doubt make sourcing files directly from the NAS much more viable alone, I recently discovered RDMA and SMB Direct with their substantially reduced overheads, and am very interested to see whether they might offer greatly increased efficiency in our workflow.
Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding much information on the viability of such a setup in a small business environment. Most documentation seems to refer to only using it between servers. Does this mean that I'm misunderstanding the technology? Can it even co-exist with a normal LAN environment?
Can anyone offer advice or experience for this sort of scenario?
Thanks,
Joe
Got a bit of an advanced question here, but I found another thread on this site that makes me hopeful I can learn some useful stuff.
Background:
Our video production business is growing rapidly and in desperate need of a NAS upgrade. In addition to running out of disk space, 1Gbps (albeit bonded) wasn't enough when the business started, and it's just ridiculously slow now where 1TB projects are concerned. Fortunately prices for 10Gbe are finally becoming reasonable lately thanks to Aquantia and Netgear.
I also recently set up a Windows 2016 server as a test, and it's proving to have a range of benefits, so it occurred to me that rather than buy another proprietary NAS, I could just put the drives in the server and use Storage Spaces to set up a high performance RAID (keeping the old one as the nightly backup). The benefits of doing so (cheap, custom and replaceable hardware, no-fuss user authentication) seem great.
Now, we use Premiere Pro mostly, and while in the past it was terrible at operating over a network, Adobe have since improved that. However, as SSDs greatly improved in size and pricing it made much more sense to just operate off local copies of the projects on a high performance drive and upload them to the NAS when done (or sync them in the background).
The Problem:
With 4K footage now being common, we now face the issue of SSDs once again being very pricey to have the capacity we require for local editing (2TB), especially in m.2 format. While merely upgrading to a 10Gbe environment will no doubt make sourcing files directly from the NAS much more viable alone, I recently discovered RDMA and SMB Direct with their substantially reduced overheads, and am very interested to see whether they might offer greatly increased efficiency in our workflow.
Unfortunately I'm having trouble finding much information on the viability of such a setup in a small business environment. Most documentation seems to refer to only using it between servers. Does this mean that I'm misunderstanding the technology? Can it even co-exist with a normal LAN environment?
Can anyone offer advice or experience for this sort of scenario?
Thanks,
Joe
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