Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

What is a disk array? Why use disk arrays in post-production?

Disk array (Redundant Arrays of Independent Drives referred to as RAID) means redundant array of independent hard disks. It is composed of many hard drives into a large capacity disk group. Commonly used RAID5, 6, 7 refers to the failure of any 1 / 2 / 3 hard disk at work, the data is not lost, the new hard disk is replaced, and when the data is automatically rebuilt, it is re-placed into the new hard disk after calculation to ensure the safety of the data.

Disk array (also known orally as storage, central storage, disk array, hard disk box, storage server, media storage …... . In fact, it all refers to the disk array) from the perspective of the application requirements of film and television production, some applications use a stand-alone directly connected array, while others require multiple people to access the shared array at the same time.

Stand-alone directly connected array

Stand-alone editing or out-of-group backup is mostly used, mostly 4, 5, 8 positions or larger capacity also has 16 bits and 24 bits. Generally divided into widows direct connection and Apple lightning direct connection. This machine is equivalent to having a large hard disk with large capacity, high speed and high security. Do RAID protection, when the hard disk damage can also ensure that the data is not lost. It can not only solve the problem of low editing performance, but also solve the problem of safe data storage and backup, so as not to worry about the data loss of the fragmented hard disk one day. And it is easier to find and manage.

Shared disk array

Multi-person production team, frequent exchange of a large number of data, waste a lot of unnecessary waiting time, affecting work efficiency. In addition, with the increase of personnel projects, we also need rich rights management and process management settings to improve the efficiency of the production team. In addition, choose the shared array, to choose to meet the company's current number of people and may reach the number of people in the future when the production copy is not stuttered! In order to really solve the team production efficiency. NAS sharing and XSAN sharing are commonly used in the market.

Whether it is a stand-alone directly connected or shared array, such as not selecting a good disk array, it often leads to abnormal stutters in material reading and writing, and the production process has to be interrupted frequently, such as opening, dragging, outputting files and other operations will become extremely slow.

How to judge the actual read and write performance of the disk array, in addition to testing and visiting the disk array in use, we must also know that the actual bandwidth performance of the disk array mainly depends on the number of hard disks and RAID technology. An ordinary mechanical hard disk with a speed of 100-200MB/s. However, with the increase of the number of hard drives, the concurrency efficiency will gradually decrease after multiple hard drives are grouped into RAID. The actual speed of one hard disk is only about 100MB/S, and even lower, it can only reach 30MB/S. If the computer configuration is enough, but the production is still slow and stuttered, then the problem is limited by the local hard disk, then it is necessary to give the computer a hardened disk, or equipped with a disk array to ensure the improvement of performance and speed.

What are the key factors in choosing a good disk array:

First, large capacity and hard disk data security:

If you choose a large capacity disk array, you can later expand the capacity to hundreds of TB or even several PB. Select RAID disk array, you can choose different RAID levels of protection to achieve different levels of data security. For example, when 12 hard drives use RAID6, it is equivalent to losing data once in 2000, which can meet the data security requirements of the more stringent commercial environment. For particularly important data, disk array double redundant backup is often used, which can improve data security from the system level.

Second, high performance to ensure that the business does not stutter:

Directly connected / NAS sharing / XSAN sharing should choose arrays with high bandwidth and IO performance. Is the standard configuration of 2 10GB ports in the parameter 20GB bandwidth? That refers to the physical interface performance, what we want is the real performance when actually running data, in order to ensure the fluency of production! For example, everyone who has used 24 hard drives knows that the market generally has a bandwidth of about 1200MB/S, and those who do not run well may only have a speed of 700 to 800 megabytes. In some cases, higher IO performance is needed to ensure the fluency of business, so we must choose SSD cache acceleration function to improve the concurrent random access performance of disk array.

Generally speaking, when multi-person production, each person needs at least more than 50M/S bandwidth to ensure that the team does not stutter. For 40-50 teams, it is generally required that the actual read and write bandwidth of the disk array is at least 2000M/S.

Third, the management authority is multi-functional:

Shared array is equivalent to a large hard disk, and these functions are often used in work: user rights management, delete protection, recycle bin, audit function, prevention of accidental deletion, remote scheduled / real-time replication, fast copy, snapshot, etc.

Film and television production is characterized by complex functions, such as multi-person production, material is often accidentally deleted or dragged, resulting in the loss of material, may cause the work results in vain. At this point, functions such as protection, recycle bin or snapshots need to be deleted to ensure the security of the material.

Fourth, save investment:

Whether it is directly connected or shared, the whole network equipment connection architecture must be cost-effective, the most important is sharing, shared network architecture may involve switches, network cards, adapter boxes, cables, shared software and so on.

NAS sharing is more appropriate for cross-platform Windows,OSX,Linux,Unix systems, while XSAN is mostly shared by Apple. Otherwise, the cost of sharing software alone (there are only a few vendors around the world) will be more expensive than the disk array itself.

5. Professional team:

Companies with professional service teams can recommend better cost-effective solutions to us from pre-sale to save unnecessary expenses. After-sales can solve the problem in a timely and thoughtful manner, rather than report it again and again. We attach most importance to the timeliness of service in film and television production. If we can directly cooperate with manufacturers (non-OEm), we certainly don't need to bother.

Jingcun disk Array is a service provider that provides professional data storage products and solutions. Since its inception, it has been committed to the research and development of big data storage products, and has taken the lead in independently developing fiber optic disk array core technologies in China, including fibre Channel and RAID technologies, and has obtained RAID invention patents and a number of software copyright certificates.

● aims at special effects synthesis and Reality Show editing business:

For example, with the same number of 24 hard drives, the performance of Jingjun disk array is doubled. Meet the team of up to 100 people to produce non-stutter at the same time.

● aims at cluster rendering business:

With SSD cache acceleration, rich rights management settings. The read and write bandwidth of the single machine head is as high as 8GB. The processing capacity of Spene IO is as high as 1.5 million IOPS. Beijing is currently the only central storage manufacturer in China that can meet the requirements of hundreds of computers for cluster rendering at the same time.

● aims at 4K shared color blending business:

The central storage of Beijing Storage can form a high-performance and stable network with Stornext and Xsan, with a single node as high as 3GB/S.

Last year we spent the cold winter of film and television, this year can not be extravagant and wasteful, disk array choose a good performance-to-price ratio!

Jingcun disk array is listed as a central storage solution tailored by film and television post-production companies for different sizes and different applications. For example, we have successfully provided post-production high-performance and high-security central storage solutions for many post-production companies, such as the Zhu brothers, the new studio, premium products, Hengxin Oriental and other post-production companies, which has greatly improved the efficiency of film and television production. make it to a new level in the film and television production industry!

The above is the read and write performance of 48 hard drives after RAID6.

Manufacturer: Beijing Wisdom Storage Technology Co., Ltd.

Company address: 11th floor, Building 5, Shangdi Tenth Street, Haidian District, Beijing

Contact information: 1870 1497228 (Wechat same number)

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