"Fast access to and efficient management of data, and hardware, and particularly software innovations, such as Tiger Technology’s metaSAN, are the catalysts for success in today’s collaborative, heavy-bandwidth work environments."

 

Robi Roncarelli, Market Analyst, PIXEL Inc.

"I am giving metaSAN five stars! If I ever end up working in another facility that needs to implement a SAN, I will definitely recommend it. I’d also recommend it to anyone involved in video that needs a file-level sharing SAN."

 

Joe Kirby, Assistant Chief Engineer, FOX 54 – WZDX TV

"With metaSAN/metaLAN in place, every artist has instant access to data by simply clicking on the local hard drive in “My Computer” – and all this without having to perform sophisticated network administration."

 

Alex Rizov, FX Supervisor, Topform Studio

"I recommend metaSAN to anyone investigating a shared storage solution, especially to anyone Final Cut Pro based production house wanting to maximize their multi-station editing workflow."

 

Graeme Nattress, President of Nattress Productions Inc.

"metaSAN is the ideal SAN management solution for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Gigabit Ethernet networks. So far, we have tested metaSAN with Huge Media-Vault and Fibrenetix Storage systems, Qlogic SANBox switches, and Atto Celerity host bus adapters and have never experienced any compatibility issues."

 

Jörg Hoffman, PSIBER GmbH

"I’m using an HP xw9300 with 4 x SATA2 drives and a Bluefish444 HD Lust board. Whenever trying to capture DPX files, the system would run for 100-250 frames and then drops frames. After installing metaSAN and using DDO and FSO the system can now capture DPX files without any problem!"

 

Gerbrand De Ridder, Trans Tec bv

"Our customers have been clamouring for tools that will help them add intelligence to their workgroups. We are very pleased to be working with Tiger Technology to address this demand."

 

Howard Solomon, President, Integrity Data Systems

"By turning off-the shelf storage and networking components into versatile, easy to support, and highly scalable shared storage workgroups, metaSAN is ideally suited to solve a wide range of workflow configurations at a great price."

 

John Connolly, Midwest Media Group President

"metaSAN’s unique ability to allow multiple cross-platform users to share content and collaborate efficiently while maintaining very high bandwidth will afford us a highly efficient, reliable, centralized and secure storage solution."

 

Michio Fujii, CEO and President, MIC Assosciates, Inc.

Configuring metaSAN for an image file sequence based workflow

Applications such as Assimilate Scratch and Iridas FrameCycler do not work with QuickTime movies but instead use image file sequences (ex: DPX, TIFF, etc.). In a SAN environment, this leads to specific challenges. A QuickTime movie often contains thousands of frames that are stored in a single file. This means that large chunks of the file are stored in contiguous segments on the drive. When a SAN member needs to playback a QuickTime movie, it sends a single metadata request to the master to understand where the file is located on the disk.

An image file sequence, on the other hand, requires one file per frame. A few minutes of video will easily generate thousands of files. In a SAN, every frame requires metadata requests to be processed before a frame can be located on disk and accessed. Instead of one metadata request for an entire QuikTime movie, a DPX sequence requires 24 metadata requests per seconds of video. A 5 min clip generates 7,200 requests. Given this huge amount of metadata, it is very difficult to ensure reliable playback as any delay in processing the request will lead to drop frames*. Tiger recommends creating a dedicated volume for the workstation needing realtime DPX playback. This workstation should be configured to become the master (MDC) of this volume (see diagram). As MDC of the volume, it doesn’t depend on any other workstation to process metadata requests. It can access the files directly. Playback performance is identical to that of a direct-attach drive. Each workstation in the SAN that is destined to perform image file sequence capture or playback, should be configured to be master of its own volume. From a workflow standpoint, all SAN members can still access all volumes containing image file sequences. But during DPX playback, the color grading workstation (that is also acting as the master) will only serve requests to other SAN members when it is able to do so. It is therefore normal that other users experience some sluggishness when accessing a volume currently used for playback. It is therefore recommended to maintain one generic SAN volume (to store QuickTime and other files) that is always available to all clients. *) Note that even on local disks without metaSAN there is still a large number of metadata requests made to the file system. When you access local storage, the system cache is helping, but still you can experience problems playing back sequences because volumes easily get fragmented. That is why many people working with image sequences often re-format their drives prior to beginning a new project. In a SAN environment the fragmentation problem is aggravated because multiple threads are writing to the volume at the same time, requesting free clusters one after the other.