What kind of network storage / file server storage do you have now? That's more likely to be your bottleneck versus network speed. ---- Jack Kramer Manager of Information Technology Communications and Brand Strategy Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955
On Jun 5, 2013, at 9:58 PM, J- P <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Thanks for the feedback, I will check with the video editors and see exactly what they are using and what licensing they have - will post back tomorrow- I also know that the CAD people sometimes complain about opening files, (Vectorworks), and I don't think its the PC's As I custom built them with quad core i-5, 16GB ram, and 256 SSD's win 7 Jean-Paul Natola ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] 10Gbe & switches- feedback Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 01:46:37 +0000 I don't think 10GbE is in your budget. To give you an idea, with our 50%+ negotiated discount on Juniper equipment we pay over $6,000 for an EX2500 switch and about $70 per Twinax 10GbE cable. Each of those X520-DA2 cards (which are great, by the way--we have several) run something like $500 on Amazon. Not to mention with only 8 spindles in your NAS array (especially assuming SATA drives) you will be totally unable to saturate a 10GbE link with random I/O and will struggle to do so with sequential workloads. Even 1080p video won't saturate a gigabit link--you really only start to run into issues once you move up to 4k resolution. In your position, I would get some nice Gigabit switches and NAS(es) specifically for bulk file storage and use link aggregation to bond 2 or 4 ports per NAS. You may still want to investigate FC for video if your demand is growing, but be aware that you will be dropping at least $20k on a proper FC setup for video work once you look at software licensing. (Our AVID setup ran about $65k for a 32 TB Unity plus 4Gb Fibre Channel, Media Composer licenses, and FC interfaces for our 4 edit bays and 4 cut stations--not including Nitrous boxes.) Stick to local storage and Hyper-V 3 on your VM hosts so you can do live migrations without shared storage, as I don't think you can afford a NAS with fast enough disk to handle your virtualization workload (unless you build your own with SSDs, but remember--that gets you into the business of supporting storage now too). ---- Jack Kramer Manager of Information Technology Communications and Brand Strategy Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231 / c: 248-635-4955 On Jun 5, 2013, at 9:31 PM, J- P <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: The main thing that seems to bog down traffic is the rendering, and the the demand keeps increasing , "keep the HD version, make an ld version, make one avi, flv etc.." i was looking at something like this for the servers http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=430-4436&ef_id=UX@GSgAABcPKlAG5:20130606010945:s&dgc=ST&cid=262075&lid=4742361&acd=1230980794501410<http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=430-4436&ef_id=UX%40GSgAABcPKlAG5:20130606010945:s&dgc=ST&cid=262075&lid=4742361&acd=1230980794501410> currently have about 2tb of data, but potentially looking at 16-24 long term,and haven't really decided on NAS option yet- maybe something like this http://www.qnapworks.com/TS-869U-RP.asp Also potentially looking at clustering sql and going HA on Exchange, - just trying "future proof" since we are moving to a new location Hardware budget in the realm of 5-7 k give or take (without the 8 hard drives for NAS) PS: Nice to see you (ASB) "back in action" Jean-Paul Natola ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Date: Wed, 5 Jun 2013 21:04:30 -0400 Subject: Re: [NTSysADM] 10Gbe & switches- feedback To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> I don't happen to see any need for 10Gbit with the workload you need to support. What kind of budget do you have? What kind of NAS are you getting (and how much storage?) Are you considering something like Cisco UCS or some other blade server chassis? Regards, ASB http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker<http://xeeme.com/AndrewBaker> Providing Virtual CIO Services (IT Operations & Information Security) for the SMB market… On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 2:49 PM, J- P <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Anyone? perhaps maybe a link ________________________________ From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [NTSysADM] 10Gbe & switches- feedback Date: Tue, 4 Jun 2013 16:28:50 -0400 Hi all, We are moving to a new location and figured may as well upgrade the infrastructure. We currently have 3COM 24 port switches from the late 90's, if I had to guess and its time to send them to rest. I have been reading and trying to get a solid feel for which way to go , and as always there is a plethora of data out there that says "Spf+ hands down" or CX4, or even cat6, Everyone seems the have "the perfect answer" and of course they all conflict. and I hope not to start a thread war on this list. Let me give a breakdown of what will be in play here Small office (< 50 users) PC's all gigabit Phones all megabit (VOIP) 6 servers; Exchange Citrix/ TS (Hyper-V) OwnCloud (Hyper-V) File Server Print Server SQL (all users connected 24x7) 2 DC's We are considering getting a NAS (10GB supported) The other heavy traffic will be from video rendering and CAD, we would like use something like backburner to spread the rendering, or maybe build a dedicated rendering server (still up in the air) all servers, switches, and possible NAS will be in the same cabinet, so distance is not a factor in terms of connecting to the switch, only the PC's will require runs greater than the 10 meters I would like also welcome any reccomendations on switches as too TIA,
