FS7: In-House Storage for Back-up

B

Berk

Well-known member
As FS7 owner we need to find a system to store/back-up 150TB of footage internally. I believe a NAS would be efficient for the task. Please let me know if you have any experience with a turn-key solution.
Thanks
Berk
 
150TB you're looking at very expensive nas. You would need raid 1 to at least duplicate everything as disk failure with this amount skyrockets. 75 hdd's times wd 4 tb red ($149)+ 19 netgear nasready 104 ($240), 11175+ 4560 = $15735.
I would look for tape media instead, it will be cheaper.
 
We got budget for $20K.. LTO is too slow to recover the files if needed (which we usually do)
 
Finding the tape, loading, browsing the files.. so yesterday :P yet very efficient I know
I am eyeing on QNAP https://www.qnap.com/i/en/

any experience?
There are very positive reviews on the amazon. Rack solutions look like what we need..
 
Well for primary storage, sure, it looks like a sound option.

But if the purpose is specifically for backup/redundancy, given that you could backup 150TB of data uncompressed onto just 25 LTO-7 tapes. I'd say that eliminates a great deal of the hassle you had with older, less dense tape storage. Plus it's SO much safer as a backup medium than having to constantly monitor the condition of a RAID.
 
Yes this will be for primary storage/backup
We got a deal with Amazon Clouds for archiving
 
I've been happy with the Synology but it's a tidler compared to 150 TB. I think calling up your local enterprise storage consultants with a wish list of requirements. It's a sizeable investment that needs to be tailored to your requirements I.e how many people will be accessing the NAS at the same time and what's the minimum performance you require.
 
If you only need it to go to one workstation and you've got two Thunderbolt ports:

Two of these at $2400 each = $4800

48x HGST 6TB drive at $257 each = $12336

You'd have two Thunderbolt rack mounts with 144TB each. Main and a backup.
 
jshbckr said:
That's like 1200 hours of XAVC 4K. What in the world do you need that for?!
Click to expand...

From the amount of data ended to be backed up/accessed it sounded to me like a workgroup and not a very large single user situation.

It's fairly easy to buy a very large NAS for a single users or a couple of infrequent users it's a different kettle of fish when you scale the requirements up to a workgroup situation.
 
Nirv said:
From the amount of data ended to be backed up/accessed it sounded to me like a workgroup and not a very large single user situation.

It's fairly easy to buy a very large NAS for a single users or a couple of infrequent users it's a different kettle of fish when you scale the requirements up to a workgroup situation.
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Yeah, massively different. Especially if you want decent read/write speeds for editing in real-time. A place I used to work spent like $60k on fibre channel for about 5 work stations, and I think our server was only like 24TB or something.
 
Thanks for suggestion
Yes, 3 editing stations will have access to the NAS. they wont be working off of the server.. This is only for local back-up..

jshbckr said:
That's like 1200 hours of XAVC 4K. What in the world do you need that for?!
Click to expand...



and we never shoot internally.. Always ProRes
 
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I use qnap nas for backing up our files, set as raid 5. We also backup to lto tape.
we had a qnap fail the other year (before we backed up to lto), we had a catastrophic failure where 4 drives failed at once! We lost a lot of footage!
you think lto is slow to recover, what do you think Amazon will be like? Lto is so cheap as storage.
 
I have a few synologies, the main one is 3612xs which is running 10gbe. That's 12 bays of 4TB drives, but that's not going to cut it for you.

Do you need 150TB of online storage?

If you go down the NAS route then you're looking at Raid 6 (2 drives of redundancy) and you need to ensure you get 'proper' NAS designed drives. I've done the usual consumer drives and after a very hairy moment i will never do that again. The NAS drives are designed for 24/7 and also to handle the vibrations of other drives in the bay - normal drives are NOT. So they will work, they'll look like they're working but they will fail.

I've been through the houses for back up.

Realistically, you're looking at LTO for backup. There simply isn't anything else out there designed for it. If you go a generation back then it's cheaper. With footage you won't see any compression so look at the rates that shown with no compression running.

The only other alternative is a bunch of 8TB drives from seagate, the SMR(?) ones? These are designed for archive as well, they are slower to write but faster to read and at 8TB each they may do better for you - but they're not as 'tested' as tape... and i have no idea about lifetime etc,.

hope this helps
Paul
 
based on the amount of storage needed, I would go with LTO for archiving. You could pruchase an LTO 7 but use LTO-6 tapes for a much cheaper $/TB cost. when LTO-8 is announced LTO-7 tapes will be cheaper and you will already have the deck for it.
 
Thank you for the suggestions, this is only for annual back-up as we constantly revisit the old project throughout the year. For archiving we will use Amazon Cloud or LTO 7.
 
I was originally looking into the QNAP's Thunderbolt solution, but decided i didn't need, it as it would just be for archiving. We were also looking at Amazon Glacier, as a whole solution, but it would have been to slow to recover if need be and scary when you here horror stories about Amazon servers going down and losing everything. We were then going to use it as a backup, but still seemed to expensive.

I'm getting in on Monday two (from Virtual Graffiti) QNAP TS-1263U-RP-4G-US $2350, with 12 x 8TB Seagate Archive drives $3096. It comes in at about 88TB in RAID5. Then we plan to use their UX-1200U-RP $1,900-$2000 expansion racks to add more space in the future. Were going to house one of the servers off site after I seed it in a colocation datacenter in our same city for about $80 a month. I'll have to report back once i've got these setup.

The system seems pretty turn key since i will be the only one using it I wanted something i wouldn't need a whole IT department for. Plus there's so many features built into these things. They even have a live demo were you can go in and mess with a server right through the web.
https://www.qnap.com/i/useng/support/con_show.php?cid=8
 
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sk810 said:
I was originally looking into the QNAP's Thunderbolt solution, but decided i didn't need, it as it would just be for archiving. We were also looking at Amazon Glacier, as a whole solution, but it would have been to slow to recover if need be and scary when you here horror stories about Amazon servers going down and losing everything. We were then going to use it as a backup, but still seemed to expensive.

I'm getting in on Monday two (from Virtual Graffiti) QNAP TS-1263U-RP-4G-US $2350, with 12 x 8TB Seagate Archive drives $3096. It comes in at about 88TB in RAID5. Then we plan to use their UX-1200U-RP $1,900-$2000 expansion racks to add more space in the future. Were going to house one of the servers off site after I seed it in a colocation datacenter in our same city for about $80 a month. I'll have to report back once i've got these setup.

The system seems pretty turn key since i will be the only one using it I wanted something i wouldn't need a whole IT department for. Plus there's so many features built into these things. They even have a live demo were you can go in and mess with a server right through the web.
https://www.qnap.com/i/useng/support/con_show.php?cid=8
Click to expand...

Are you sure those archive drives will work in RAID? I'm fairly sure they won't, they're not designed for it and the NAS will have problems with them. Perhaps these are different models to the one's i've seen. You should check that before going too far with them.

I used Glacier too, but only for project/nuke script files. Assets are just too big to transfer. So unless you've got some kind of super connection i don't think that's feasible. You pay for the speed of recovery though - for large files quickly it can really add up.

I'm not aware of any horror stories with Amazon though, the whole point is the multi region redundancy? I used both Amazon S3, Glacier and also Azure without issues.

Interesting you went for QNAP, i had both a model of that and also ReadyNAS too - dumped them for synology which i've had running for years now.

cheers
Paul
 
paulcurtis said:
Are you sure those archive drives will work in RAID? I'm fairly sure they won't, they're not designed for it and the NAS will have problems with them. Perhaps these are different models to the one's i've seen. You should check that before going too far with them.

I used Glacier too, but only for project/nuke script files. Assets are just too big to transfer. So unless you've got some kind of super connection i don't think that's feasible. You pay for the speed of recovery though - for large files quickly it can really add up.

I'm not aware of any horror stories with Amazon though, the whole point is the multi region redundancy? I used both Amazon S3, Glacier and also Azure without issues.

Interesting you went for QNAP, i had both a model of that and also ReadyNAS too - dumped them for synology which i've had running for years now.

cheers
Paul
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The Western Digital RAID Edition drives I bought for a personal RAID were the most unreliable drives I have ever purchased. It was back when 500GB drives were huge and expensive and these blighters all failed one by one over the course of about 2 months. I didn't even bother getting the drives replace under warranty.

I know what the marketing says about RAID and NAS drives but I'd love to see some independent data that backs up the claims. The great Google drive survey couldn't determine much beyond a crappy drive with initial disk errors is more likely to fail early than drives with no errors to begin with.

The real interesting data that Google discovered i.e. which manufacturers make the more reliable drives has not been released.

I'm a bit of a sceptic about the value of NAS specific drives. If you have any data that supports the NAS claims I'd love to read it.
 
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