Hi,



following on from my earlier post about disk expansion options, I thought I'd open the discussion up a bit and find out what other people are doing for storage.



Our current system has a 250Gb mirrored volume for the audiowall. There are currently about 4000 tracks there, and it's 80% full. I guess that's the penalty paid for storing material as uncompressed .wav files.



Firstly - is uncompressed normal? Are other people using this or would I be best to change the default audiowall format? The system was configured this way before I got involved.



Next - what sort of storage subsystems are people using on their Myriad PCs? At present, I have several expansion options. The simplest is just to add another PCI SATA card and 2 more internal drives. Need to watch the temperature though.



Option 2 is an external SATA enclosure.



Option 3 is a network-attached storage (NAS) unit.



Option 4 - well there are lots of option 4s



So my question is - what storage subsystems are people using with Myriad? How much storage do you have? Does it work well?



Thanks in advance,

Bruce.



(and I've not even mentioned backup options yet!)

Bruce

In charge of wires & stuff

Celtic Music Radio http://www.celticmusicradio.net

Hi Bruce and Malcolm,

Firstly Bruce- Uncompressed audio is normal, to be honest it’s all about quality and stability. Compressed audio formats while often adequate do not have the audio clarity that uncompressed does. Add to this the additional stress put on the system which will have to decompress these files ‘on the fly’ to play out/edit/record etc and it’s easy to de why we don’t set a compressed format as the default.

Next – I would be looking at adding new internal drives to the server rather than any external option as external points of failure always make me nervous, they usually incur a greater possibility of failure and are more likely to become bottle necked as traffic demand increases. Temperature can be controlled relatively easily with additional fans if need be (or any equivalent cooling solution). Although the other options you mentioned will work I generally prefer this method of its reliability.

Malcolm, PowerNET in Myriad v3 is how the network names and descriptions of each system, basically Myriad can tell that TEST-MYR-STU-01 is Studio 1 and WENDYS-PC is Studio 2. This helps when looking at play logs and compiling reconciliation files.

Lastly, the multiple networks question.

Yes it is possible to run everything through two network switches ‘side-by-side’ however this would not mean that myriad would maintain a perfect connection in the event of a failure. Because of the way the audio is streamed directly from the server and the databases as kept as an open connection myriad would almost certainly fail and at the very least loose the audio it was currently playing. Because replacing a switch is a five minuet job I would be tempted to just have a dedicated spare ready to replace it if needed.

Hope this helps,

John-Michael
P Squared System Engineer

There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand Binary and those who don’t.

Thanks for the advice, chaps. My gut feeling is to go for a couple of additional internal drives in the first instance.



As to the networking question posed by Malcolm... networking and design of high-availability systems is what I do in my "day job", so I'll have a stab at answering.



[/quote]Perhaps someone at PSquared can indicate whether running two networks switches is a good idea. Is it easy to setup? Can audio be routed over one network but fall-over to the other if there's a failure?[/quote]



Running 2 networks in parallel is trivial. The difficult bit is persuading your applications to use them both!



Normally when you configure a physical interface under Windows, you assign an IP address to the interface. So a machine with 2 interfaces wouldn have 2 IP addresses. However, since you only use 1 address (or name) when configuring the share, you don't get automatic failover of resources on failure, even though there is a physical link.



There are several ways round this. None trivial. One option would be to set up 2 physical networks and 2 address ranges, run an active routing protocol between the 2 boxes, assign internal loopback addresses on another 2 different networks to the 2 PCs, and make sure all shares reference the loopback rather than the physical interface addresses. If you have read what I've just written and don't immediately understand it, then this probably isn't the solution for you...



Another solution - and one that I use regularly - is to use some sort of proprietory interface failover, where two separate physical interfaces are treated as one logical device. The one we use is the proprietory HP "teaming" product.



You could also probably do something similar using IEEE 802.3ad link aggregation.



But, like John-Michael, I'd question the need for doing this in a Myriad environment. I'm doing this stuff in a data centre, with millions of pounds worth of kit, and tens of thousands of people using it simultaneously. If it breaks, several thousand people can't do their job.



However, in a smaller environment, where there perhaps isn't the same level of technical support available, I'd question the need to go to such complexity. The concern is is that by introducing extra "resilience", you by necessity make the system more complicated, and very quickly you can get to the point where you're actually decreasing the reliability!



An "enterprise-class" simple L2 network switch is obviously much more expensive than the 50 quid cheapies that you can pick up for home use. But the mean time between failure of these units can be typically around 50 years!



It's actually fairly unusual for the electronics of an ethernet switch to fail - the most common problems are PSU failure or fan failure. If I were building an ultra-resilient system, I'd build it with dual everything, but for a mid-level system, where I wanted high reliability without overkill, I'd probably be speccing a single switch, with dual hot-swappable PSUs and fans.



Bruce.

Bruce

In charge of wires & stuff

Celtic Music Radio http://www.celticmusicradio.net