Thanks for the helpful comments, Greg.:-)
Yes, they are extremely robust, cost-effective solutions. Note that this
particular model comes with the IO option, which means it can be used
for capture (as a DDR) and/or playback in either Standard and High
Definition. Just hook it up to one of your favorite VTRs via the SDI
interface and away you go. This is in addition to it's primary role as a
NAS appliance (over NFS or SMB).
This system previously supported a farm of 45 dual proc nodes (under
Samba) quite easily. Another client of mine (City of LA) has one of the
latest generation SledgeHammer NAS products with 8TB of storage and even
with 72 render nodes pounding on it 24/7, it has yet to complain. The
load barely registers under CPU utilization graphs. Of course, YMMV
depending on your application. To maximize performance, I suggest using
NFS mounts if you can, and move over to Jumbo frames if your network can
support it. Jumbo frames are a particular advantage when you are doing
2D intensive renders where you are moving a lot of data across the
network. This can seriously degrade the performance of any server,
regardless of brand or cost...
RANDOM Read/Write Aggregate throughput approaches something like 300MB
per second on this unit, IIRC, while sequential reads are over 500MB per
sec.
It is a fairly easy to maintain system with a GUI administrative
console. If you are comfortable with Redhat (the SledgeHammer OS is
based on a lightweight distro of Redhat vers 7), you can drop into a
remote terminal for CLI administration at any time.
If you are interested in seeing a demonstration of this unit, please
contact me for an appt.
Thanks.
Jeff Yana
Greg Ercolano wrote:
Jeff Yana wrote:
Dear List-
For sale is a SledgeHammer HDIO System with HD playback capabilities
and 4TB of high performance Fibre Channel SCSI storage.
Yes, those Sledgehammers are supposedly decent and cost effective
file servers for high load environments.
I believe Jeff has done some extensive tests with these boxes
and found them to be fairly stable under load. (YMMV) I forget
how large a network he used to test with, you can get details
from him.
|