This IS the Avid L2: Re: [Avid-L2] Best practice to Whack A San?

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Re: [Avid-L2] Best practice to Whack A San?

Turns out moving the 10 gig ethernet over fibre card from slot 4 a X4lane slot to slot 2 a X16 lane slot got things cooking on the 10 gig card. As far as the gigE connection I'm getting 110 to 118MB/sec which is pretty full tilt gigE performance so that station is fine and now the 10 gig is fine. Only issue is I had to move an AJA IO Express HBA from slot 2 to slot 4 and now it doesn't work. AJA support got right back to me and said it should work but I might have to zap PRAM and delete a preference file or two. Hopefully that will get the IO Express working again.

---In Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com, <bigfish@...> wrote :

Even the 10 gig ethernet over fibre clients are running slow so I don't suspect the cabling but you never know. The San people are asking me to uninstall fibre manager even though it's not running they think it might be contributing to the issue. Sounds like a shot in the dark but they're the san guys and they set this up for test without checking bandwidth. Hmmmmm can you say Isis is looking better and better, not that it ever looked bad to me but I'm not the money person.

---In avid-l2@yahoogroups.com, <bouke@...> wrote :

Huh?

I'm on a 5 drive shared storage system, 1gig ethernet (Iscsi) and over 2 (el cheapo) hubs i'll get more than 100 MB/sec.

(BM speedtest, real world is around 80 MB/sec)

Good CAT 6 cabling and good connectors do help. (Long stripped ends really make a difference, not for the good!)

My cables are thick, not flexible and expensive. Thin prefab Cat6 cable simply does not work at these speeds.

Try swapping machines / cabling, see if that is the culprit. Reset hubs. Divide and conquer.

Oh, and be afraid of copytests. Especially on network drives / removable drives, your OS might cache, thus your second attempt will be blazing fast but not representative.

Bouke

VideoToolShed
van Oldenbarneveltstraat 33
6512 AS NIJMEGEN, the Netherlands
+31 24 3553311

----- Original Message -----
From: bigfish@... [Avid-L2]
To: Avid-L2@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, April 21, 2015 11:09 AM
Subject: Re: [Avid-L2] Best practice to Whack A San?

I'm sort of doing what I can. I have created a bunch of extra volumes/workspaces varying from 2 TB to 5 TB. I'm running three computers two with 10 gig cards but what is surprising is the two computers that are supposedly on 10 gig connections are running slower than the AE station that I was told was on GB ethernet. I'm seeing only about 5MB/sec on one of the 10 gig computers and about 45MB/sec on the second 10 gig computer. These are older macpro towers with 4 and 8 cores. The AE station with a 2012 mid macpro 12 core is showing 110MB/sec. I'm using network activity on the activity monitor for these readings. AJA speed test does not see these drives to test. The are AFP or some sort of appletalk along with nas setup in the client manager. I'm have taken up most of the san with these volumes so out of about 36TB only about 2TB is unallocated. I'm filling up what I can but things are a little wonky. The slowest computer doesn't show a copying progress bar but appears to be copying. I've restarted it and reinitialized the copies but still no progress bar for the copies. The other two computers show the copy progress bar I'm use to on all macs. I'm hoping that by allocating almost all the space it will somewhat mimic a full san. Tomorrow with the editors hitting it I hope to take at least one of the stations and have it recopying between test volumes on the san all the media I can muster to get copied overnight. Like I originally posted I've seen finder level copies really take their toll on sans so I hope to see white smoke coming from the machine room when I get through with this critter.

Given the manufacturer is claiming 1000MB/sec bandwidth I'm surprised at how slow my simple copies are going. Some of the bottleneck is much of my media sources are coming in over Gig ethernet to get sent to the test san. I added a FW 800 and an Esata Graid d rive on the AE station that's moving the most data to eliminate some of the source bottle neck but we'll see how things .

---In avid-l2@yahoogroups.com, <mikeparsons.tv@...> wrote :

The most important thing to do is FILL IT UP before doing any tests. Preferably with scattered rushes that you then conform different edls from in different rooms. DPX files hurt more too.

Then hit playback on all your sequences and watch the lights flash.

You can also stick speed disk on each machine and run them all simultaneously ... but by far the most telling test is to take the time to fill the disks, performance on an empty san is never real world testing.

Mike

On 4/21/15 2:22 PM, John Moore bigfish@... [Avid-L2] wrote:

We'll be testing out a potential San replacement for our aging Unity MediaNet 5s. We'll try to through some complex sequences and as many multi groups as we can but we have a limited number of stations set up on the test rig. Edit stations are connected through 10 gig ethernet over fibre and AE stations are on 1 GB ethernet. Beside the avid drills and a producer station, also connected 1GB ethernet I'm thinking of throwing some big and small file desktop level copies as I've seen that suck the bandwidth out of some of the best of them. Trying to come as close as we can to 20 plus seats going when we only have about 5 attached. So come on and give me your special methods to "Whack A San." I want the baby to beg for mercy.

John Moore
Barking Trout Productions
Studio City, CA
bigfish@...

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