"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.

Dedicated metadata master or not?

metaSAN (as well as metaSAN iSCSI and metaLAN Server) relies on a floating master architecture to manage the SAN. Because metaSAN requires very little CPU to manage the SAN, it is possible to let any member act as the SAN master - there’s no need an Xserve machine to supervise HFS+ volumes, or to use computer running Windows Server OS as metadata master of NTFS volumes. But if metaSAN does not require lots of CPU, it still needs some. The use of a dedicated metadata controller is recommended in the following scenarios:

  • When failover disruption is not acceptable to users (mission critical environments).
  • When CPU availability of the floating master cannot be guaranteed
  • When stability of the floating master cannot be guaranteed
  • When the Virtualization for Avid feature is enabled a dedicated master is always recommended because of complex permissions settings.

Here are a few observations that will help determine if you need to plan for an additional workstation or not.

  1. There is one (and only one) master per SAN volume.
    The master is the machine that receives requests and grants permissions to other SAN members. It must be of the native file system format. For instance, a Windows machine is required to master an NTFS volume, and a Mac is required to master an HFS+ volume. As such, failover of an HFS+ volume cannot take place on a Windows machine, and vice-versa. The master requires a direct connection to the storage.
  2. Avoid rebooting the master.
    By default, the first machine to boot becomes the SAN master. It is possible to define priorities among the various SAN members. It is also possible to assign different masters to different SAN volumes. A master remains master of the SAN until failover occurs.Failover will occur when the current master stops responding (due to a crash or shut down). Failover will cause mastership to be transferred to the next available workstation (based on assigned priorities) or to the manually selected workstation in the case of a manual promotion. Each failover occurrence will cause the SAN to become unresponsive for a few second.
  3. Avoid rendering on the master.
    You should avoid rendering on a master machine so other members do not experience sluggishness. Rendering leaves no CPU to metaSAN. The more files a master must serve or the more fragmented a file system is, the more CPU cycles will be consumed by metaSAN to serve requests from client machines. More resources are necessary when gathering cluster chains for fragmented files or finding suitable space to allocate for new files on a fragmented file system.
  4. The master has no performance hit.
    Prior to opening or closing a file, a client workstation must send a request to the master, and wait for the response. That arbitration process eliminates the risks of corruption when multiple computers access the SAN at the same time. However, a small delay is incurred on the transaction. The delay is near constant and is independent of the size of the file. When accessing large files, such as MPEG and QuickTime movies, the overhead is negligible. But when accessing lots of very small files, this overhead can affect performance. This is why - notwithstanding the previous points - that it can be a good idea to assign mastership to the workstation that requires fastest access to the shared storage.

As a rule of thumb, any setup with more than 4 SAN members should have a dedicated master.