Category: Uncategorized

Data Storage Project

Overview

The first project SR Media Group worked on was for an old friend of mine. He recently started a Marketing company and found out that the faster you produce content for your customers the faster you burn through data. The goal with this project was to off load the raw video, audio and photos from the editing rigs to a local Network Attached Storage for “on the NAS editing.”

Hardware

Getting to a state of “on the NAS editing” was going to have to be solved with new hardware and cabling.

  • Switch capable of 10Gbps/2.5Gbps/1Gbps
  • NAS with redundant 10Gbps NICs
  • 7200 RPM SMB/Enterprise grade HDDs
  • Cat6A Cable
  • High Speed >=2.5Gbps Network Cards
  • UPS Battery Backup
  • Secure Wall Rack (locking)

Storage

I started off by installing 6 4TB IronWolf Pros into a Synology NAS and setting it to RAID 5.

Capacity20 TB
Speed gain5x read speed, no write speed gain
Fault tolerance1-drive failure
RAID5 is a pretty standard setup with more than 5 or more disks. However I encourage you to figure out what your needs are regarding Fault Tolerance vs Speed.

Networking

We made some improvements to the overall networking infrastructure by adding a Zyxel 10Gbps/2.5Gbps/1Gbps networking switch to the office. This switch will be handling all of the NAS traffic through two Cat6A 10Gbps SFP+ ports, one Cat6A line will be ran to each iMac and terminated on the 2.5Gbps ports on the switch, and all other machines within the office will terminate to the 1Gbps ports on the switch.