Edit Expertise: Storage Savings

A budget-friendly storage system such as Maxx Digital''s Final Share SAN might be entry-level, but features do include 8TB of storage, a Gigabit Ethernet (GE) card, and a GE switch.

Workaday products such as disk arrays for video editing, or related technology such as codec cards, are as integral to video production as new HD cameras and editing applications; they're just not as sexy. Moving your video on and off storage is a key to editing, while transcoding makes your project available for DVD, web, and cell phone distribution.

The steady if quiet success of drive makers such as Seagate Technology or Western Digital isn't headline material. That industry improves according to a metric that's similar to micro-processing's Moore's Law. For much of the past decade, that's worked out to storage capacity doubling every 18 months for equal dollar value.

The progress of compression and transcoding technology looks to be just as dull (and successful), with comparable gains through improved algorithms and savvy electronics design. You rarely read headlines about it, but this crucial technology helps transmit video over the Web and deliver Blu-ray Discs to Wal-Mart.

If you buy a disk array today, you're benefitting from the blistering speed of technology changes. In July 2002, Avid Technology announced Avid Unity LANshare EX v3.0. Described by the company as the industry's most cost-effective shared-storage system, this basic Fibre Channel (FC)-connected 2TB unit cost $40,000. Today, CalDigit sells its HDPro — a 2TB SAN-ready storage subsystem capable of a claimed 400MBps throughput — for $3,995.

In the current economy, that steady downward trend in prices might not be enough for video professionals who need to upgrade their infrastructures. But if you're still planning to put together a storage system for post-production or investing in compression gear, your bottom line might be in luck. I recently polled a representative sample of storage and compression manufacturers and resellers. Some companies have cut prices in direct response to current economic woes, while others promote new technologies that are more cost-effective than older solutions.

Aware of trim budgets, Atto Technology reduced the cost of its line of Celerity 8Gbps FC HBAs and doubled the performance of the older 4Gbps cards.

If you want to save money by building your own direct-attached storage system, for example, start with the heart of any good setup — the host bus adapter (HBA) that sits in your workstation.

One longtime supplier, Atto Technology, shows that nimble vendors — aware of the cratering of budgets — realize they need to pull down prices, even on the highest-end gear.

This past September, the Amherst, N.Y.-based company announced it was delivering its initial generation of 8Gbps Fibre Channel HBAs, some of the first such high-speed HBAs to come to market.

These Celerity-branded 8Gbps FC cards double the performance of today's top-level 4Gbps products while maintaining full backward compatibility with the large installed base of 4Gbps and 2Gbps FC gear. They also make use of Atto's ADS (Advanced Data Streaming) technology, which is claimed to improve I/O.

These are very fast connections: some 1600MBps maximum throughput per channel in full duplex mode (i.e. carrying data in both directions at the same time). While it might seem like overkill to some, such high-speed links future-proof your investment. The highest-end 4K productions can hook together four ports at once to deliver the throughput they need.

This past December, the company decided to lower prices on this line of new 8Gbps cards as well as the previous 4Gbps generation; entry-level ExpressPCI SCSI series cards got a similar price cut.

“Even if you don't have an immediate need for the throughput on our 8Gbps line, you can minimize power costs, since the new cards have lower power consumption than the prior generation or competing [8Gbps] products,” says Tom Kolniak, director of product management for Atto. Meanwhile, according to Kolniak, Atto has lowered the prices of the SCSI HBA products some 15 percent to 20 percent, placing them among the least expensive of these older-gen devices.

Atto's top-of-the-line Celerity FC-81EN, a single-channel 8Gbps HBA, now lists for $1,295, shaving $200 off the manufacturer's initial list price (expect more savings from a dealer). It's capable of delivering five streams of 1080i60 HD video.

Pyro AV cut the price of the Pyro Kompressor HD because of rough economic times. The PCI Express-based card speeds up AVC/H.264 compression, Adobe Flash output, MXF wrapper support (for Sony''s XDCAM), and transcoding to uncompressed RAW/YUV formats.

Another type of specialized plug-in card, one sporting a video-compression chip, could be central to building out your system. And top vendors here are marching to the realities of our current economy, too.

Pyro AV, a creator of video-capture and conversion gear, says it dropped the price on its Pyro Kompressor HD from $3,495 to $1,495 in response to the difficult economic times. The PCI Express-based card accelerates HD H.264/AVC encoding up to eight times faster than does software-only video compression, according to the company.

Alfred Bantug, director of sales and marketing of the Cerritos, Calif.-based company, says he believes that the closest technological competition for the Kompressor HD sits at a higher price point, but that wasn't enough of a cushion for Pyro AV. “We felt we had to drop the price even more, however, with the way the economy has been going,” Bantug says. “It wasn't a problem [10] months ago, but now it is for a lot of people.”

The Pyro Kompressor HD, available in versions for Mac and PC, helps save time when an editor or effects artist needs to create a test compression during video editing, compositing, or special effects work. According to Bantug, using a software-only approach to compress a 2-hour HD movie for a Blu-ray Disc might take some 30 hours; the Kompressor HD card reduces that task to around 4 hours. The card also helps speed HD Flash conversion, too. “For SD resolutions, current software codecs work well enough, but that's not the case for HD-resolution work,” Bantug says. “Saving time is saving you money. Even a dual quad-core workstation will not be as fast as a single quad-core with one of our cards.”

If you want to buy an off-the-shelf array, your choices for bargains continue to grow here too.

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Storage vendors such as MicroNet are finding ways to build products less expensively to challenge even established lower-cost leaders such as CalDigit.

This past fall, MicroNet announced a lower-cost SAN that offers fast, block-level access to storage — an approach similar to how data reads and writes are handled in speedy FC-SAN arrays.

To keep costs down in its MaxNAS array, the Torrance, Calif.-based company replaces pricey FC components with less expensive, standardized Gigabit Ethernet. Its unified NAS/iSCSI storage solution — prices start at $1,349 for a 2.5TB unit — also consumes 35 percent less power than conventional file servers, says the company, by spinning down disk drives when not in use and incorporating an energy-efficient ultralow-voltage Intel processor.

The final option is to buy a completely configured storage system. That's right, leave the worrying about which parts work together to a value added reseller (VAR). Maxx Digital sells and supports Atto products along with its own line of Atto-connected RAID storage arrays. The Huntington Beach, Calif.-based VAR also sells and services edit systems and a range of production and post gear to freelancers and small to midsize facilities.

VARs study various combos of storage gear to see how well they work in deadline-stressed edit suites, so you're getting the benefit of reports from the trenches. “Many of our Atto sales are from repeat customers,” says Devon Cook, director of sales and marketing at Maxx Digital. “They've tried [Atto] products before and found them reliable. While Atto's [recently announced] 15-percent price reductions aren't game changers, every bit helps in this economy.”

Maxx Digital's inhouse-designed Final Share SAN has garnered interest among Apple Final Cut Pro editors; the entry-level turnkey system features a Mac Pro, 8TB of storage, low-cost Gigabit Ethernet (GE) card, and a GE switch. Software that enables port aggregation allows four users at a time to achieve 70MBps throughput for around $10,000, according to Cook.

“Simply put, Final Share allows Final Cut Pro users to edit ProRes 422 HQ, DVCPRO HD, and Red camera footage over an Ethernet shared-storage network for a fraction of the cost of Fibre Channel,” Cook says.

For those up to the challenge of creating their own storage gear, Cook recommends a column on building an affordable SAN by Maxx Digital's chief video engineer Bob Zelin. (see magazine.creativecow.net/article/build-your-own-affordable-san-that-iworksi).

Considering the state of the economy, the demand for storage has remained remarkably steady. But don't expect that to last, especially with alternatives to traditional storage on the horizon. While you won't use this to edit your video yet, one new Internet-based technology has taken off: virtualized storage, more popularly known as cloud storage. Today, tightening budgets that slash capital expenditures help fuel a growing interest in the type of storage that requires only a fast Internet connection. For a tiered usage charge, cloud storage allows access to storage on an as-needed basis — no upfront investment necessary.

Cloud storage businesses such as Nirvanix employ Amazon's S3, an open-structure, Internet-based storage service, to offer online storage and distribution (See digitalcontentproducer.com/storage/revfeat/cloud_you_1208). Nirvanix claims its Storage Delivery Network can save businesses 80 percent to 90 percent versus building and maintaining a storage solution.

But while your future storage might exist in the cloud, you can save money by checking out a sampling of more traditional storage companies that are knocking prices down to earth.

Storage hardware doesn't appreciate your economic woes, so you really need to protect it with advanced RAID technology.

A chief trainer for Future Media Concepts, Jeffrey I. Greenberg knows both Avid and Apple NLE products well. After all, he's been a teacher and professional-level editor on film and video projects for over 14 years, so he's experienced myriad gotchas of both product lines. The ones he hasn't witnessed himself, he's heard about.

Greenberg has come to expect to hear one common complaint. "One thing that comes up again and again when I teach my courses on troubleshooting on the Avid and on Final Cut Pro, is that someone put their entire show on a hard drive and it crashes and everything is gone," he says.

He smiles and shakes his head. "In the best of worlds the originals are on tape and they just have to recapture. In the worst of situations, they have lost everything and they are panicking," he says. Greenberg recommends that when a production's source material reaches the 1-2TB range, you must find the money for a RAID 5 setup. "This much footage simply takes too much time to rebuild," he says. "You need something with redundancy so that when a drive dies, there is enough concurrent data on the other drives to rebuild that information.

"All hard drives die. I have a love-hate relationship with every hard drive manufacturer, because I've had one fail from each one of them. It's just the nature of these things, and the sooner you prepare for and expect it to happen, the better."

Another recommendation from Greenberg: Keep a workable backup system on a hard drive that's safely stored. "I have a hard drive with my [Mac OS X] system on it along with a copy of Final Cut Pro," Greenberg says. "If my main machine should die tomorrow, I can plug in this drive and be back at work within five minutes. I'll solve [the crash] later, but I need to be working now." —D.O.