Network attached storage can help an organization manage media by centralizing it and making it accessible to individuals in the organization based on access permissions, without requiring the management of multiple individual drives sometimes euphemistically referred to as a “Sneaker Network.”
Questions? Find answers and solutions here: creative.space.
Recently, I had several clients ask me to assist them in the review of the current options available for Enterprise Network Attached Storage (NAS) Media Production Platforms and through my discussions, I realized not everyone understands what “Network Attached Storage” is. DigitalGlue’s creative.space team reached out to me after reading my review to see if I would be interested in testing one of their systems. It was during this process that I spent a fair amount of time talking with their senior management team and product management/development teams discussing the philosophy and technology of network attached storage.
With the recent global conditions over the past year there has been an ever-increasing push to move everything to “cloud” resources. However, when it comes to editing full resolution material (UHD, 8K, RAW, etc.) cloud options tend to be fewer and further between and expensive. There is still a huge need for cost effective on-premise high performance media editing storage, and creative.space is actually a unique approach where high performance storage is provided on-premise as a managed service with a cloud-like OPEX pricing approach. It even includes features for remote workflows, creating a solution that they like to refer to as “fog.” That is, you get the benefits of high-speed storage as a manageable monthly expense with capacity that can grow over time without a large capital investment, and it supports remote users with the same bandwidth limitations as cloud.
NAS in a nutshell
Network Attached Storage (NAS) is, as its name suggests, storage that is shared and accessed via one’s ethernet-based local area network (LAN). NAS is fundamentally a server with a large amount of storage incorporated into its design. The CPU is utilized to present and manage the storage across a network and user access. The more users/storage, the more CPU/network resources typically are required.
Prior to the advent of NAS most shared storage was presented via a “Storage Area Network“ or SAN. The SAN was presented to individual computers as direct attached storage via a dedicated private network utilizing Fiber Channel. SAN solutions were expensive and complicated to manage and mostly reserved for larger organizations with dedicated technology staff. The benefit to the media industry is that they could provide upwards of eight Gbps of bandwidth access to the storage which was orders of order faster than the standard 1GbE networks of the day. Today with 10Gbps local area networks being fairly standard and 25/50G systems becoming more ubiquitous, Fiber Channel solutions have declined in popularity.
The first Network Attached Storage solutions were developed in the early 1980s by familiar names such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, 3COM, Novell, and Microsoft. By the mid 2000s NAS vendors began to develop solutions focused on small business solutions and specialized solutions focusing on the media industry. As of 2021, there are multiple vendors providing network attached storage solutions focused on the media industry providing support for multiple simultaneous UHD and 8K workflows. creative.space offers several solutions which can support from a handful of simultaneous users to over 100 concurrent edit stations producing UHD and 8K content.
At a deeper level
Now that we have the history out of the way let’s get a few items defined that will help those who may not be as familiar with storage and networking. We can start simple with a “bit” which is the smallest and most basic unit of digital information. Typically, you will see things measured in megabits (1000 bits) per second or Mbps (i.e., video bit rate) or gigabits (1,000,000 bits) per second or Gbps (i.e., network transport rate).
The next term that is important is a byte which is a unit of digital information that consists of eight bits. I know this may be very basic to those of us who work in the digital world on a daily basis, but it’s an important concept to understand when comparing metrics of bandwidth and even us “professionals” can get them confused.
There are two types of “bandwidth” measurements that are important to NAS solutions and each are typically presented in a different metric. It is this “difference” where many people incorrectly identify the “speed” of the system.
The first item is aggregate disk bandwidth (throughput) or how much data can the disk read or write over a period of time. This is typically measured in Megabytes per second (MB/s) or Gigabytes per second (GB/s). This value is dependent on what type of disk (SATA, SAS, Spinning HD, SSD) and how many of them are being used in and what type of RAID configuration. The default RAID implementation for the media world is RAID 6 with two parity disks. This allows for up to two drives to fail in a RAID before you lose capability.
creative.space’s entry-level solution, the //ROGUE PRO, provides over 2.5 GB/s of disk bandwidth which can support over 100 simultaneous HD Prores 422/23.98 fps streams. Their all SSD solution, //BREATHLESS, provides over 20 GB/s of disk bandwidth which is enough to support over 1,600 streams of HD Prores 422/23.98 fps or over 400 streams of UHD Prores 422/23.98 fps.
The second important bandwidth measurement is that of the network interface. The standard interface on computers today is one Gigabit per second (Gbps). Over the past few years, 10 Gbps interfaces have become more common to the desktop as well. Core switches are now coming equipped with 25/50 Gbps and even 100 Gbps as standard offerings.
creative.space’s OPEX model allows an organization to select a base connection to the storage (10/25/40/50/100G) at no additional cost to their monthly bill and more importantly, upgrade to a faster interface in the future, again for no additional cost. This allows an organization to maximize its network infrastructure investment and grow it over time without being concerned about the additional cost to support its storage infrastructure. In most cases, a “link aggregated pair” of 10G network interfaces or a single 40G NIC is more than enough to support a company's needs and are relatively standard interfaces found on most core network infrastructure switches.
Now we have to equate the two measurements to make sense of everything. As you might remember from computer class there are eight bits in a byte. So a one (1) Gbps ethernet connection can consume up to a maximum of 0.125 GB/s or 125 MB/s of disk bandwidth. A 10 Gbps ethernet connection can consume up to a maximum of 1.25 GB/s or disk bandwidth.
The "Bits vs Bytes" chart provide you with an equivalency between bit and bytes when it comes to measuring network vs. disk bandwidth.
The bottom line
One of the fundamental drivers in selecting a media-centric NAS is how many simultaneous streams of video it can handle for a given CODEC, or in other words, "How many editors can I have attached to the storage and still have them be able to get their jobs done?" The "Number of streams per network connection" chart helps to illustrate the number of streams supported on each connection type for the given CODEC and the number of theoretical streams based on disk throughput.
In the market today, there are two basic types of NAS solutions, one based on traditional hardware RAIDs and the other based on a software-defined model utilizing OpenZFS. Hardware-based storage systems have been the primary solutions for the past decade or more. They utilize a RAID controller which is a card or chip that sits between the operating system and the storage drives. RAID controllers work to virtualize the drives into a distinct group (volume) with specific protections and redundancy and present them to the operating system. The operating system then manages the file system on the volume.
In software-defined storage solutions utilizing OpenZFS, the file system and volume management is provided by ZFS itself. ZFS is not an operating system, in fact, it relies on the Linux OS (as well as being ported now to other OS’s). It was designed as a next-generation file system to address the fundamental issues with existing storage platforms, it utilizes storage pooling, automatically repairs corrupted data, and provides data protection similar to hardware RAIDs.
creative.space has highly optimized OpenZFS for media workflows. From its //ROGUE PRO to the //DEUS EX, all its solutions utilize the same software, which consistently delivers industry-leading performance and ease of use.
I have been in the “storage” world for nearly two decades, both as a purchaser/user and as a vendor of high-end broadcast storage for playout and ingest, and would say my views on hardware- vs. software-defined solutions have definitely shifted over the past five years. In the past I would have only recommended a hardware-based solution, as software-defined storage just didn’t have the performance required.
Software-defined solutions based on ZFS are now equal to and, in many cases, surpassing the performance of hardware-based RAID solutions. A lot of this is due to Moore’s law and the advances in compute and memory technologies, but also the various optimizations in the OpenZFS platform. In addition, ZFS was built from the ground up for the protection of data, and through the use of its Copy on Write and Snapshotting technology, as well as providing for three stripes of parity, I can say without a doubt your media will be very safe on a ZFS based solution.
Rooted in their experience as a systems integrator, DigitalGlue has created a solution that uniquely targets the pain points for customers making decisions on storage. creative.space provides industry leading performance and data integrity that is scalable to ensure that it fits the demands of any organization. And finally, its unique approach of providing on-premise managed storage with an OPEX pricing model like many cloud providers all but eliminates the requirement for a capital expenditure request.
Learn more about DigitalGlue's products at creative.space.
