"We further understand that HDS has been unable to identify the reason for the freezes"
Probably using Telstra copper.
ABC storage project adrift in 'brown ocean'
A project to replace storage underpinning edit suites and video storage at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) is not going smoothly, with newly-acquired storage systems shelved before user acceptability testing. The Register understands that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) is the main player in a four-company consortium …
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 04:12 GMT david 12
wtf is 'brown ocean' ?
When I read the title, I thought they maybe meant the project was adrift in a sea of shit ??? But when I read the article, the've aparently used the phrase seriously to mean somthing like "a brown field site" -- a usage I've never seen or heard before. Can someone point me to a definition and other usage?
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 05:13 GMT frank ly
Re: wtf is 'brown ocean' ?
Wikipedia! it tells you :) It's an weather phenomenon involving cyclones moving from sea to land and getting stronger. It could be that he means that any problems intensify when the kit is installed in its final site. However, I suspect that the spokesman was using the expression as a euphemism for a vast quantity of crap.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 07:20 GMT pblakez
Once Again Aus Gov / Gov Corps ignore Open Source used at Cloud Scale
Ceph distributed object store could start small with test pilot easy to setup
I have struck this problem at state / local gov level it's the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" syndrome fire the clowns and as I have said elsewhere Gov / Gov Corps need to start using xprize style competition to get better more cost effective solutions
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 13:17 GMT DesktopGuy
Re: Once Again Aus Gov / Gov Corps ignore Open Source used at Cloud Scale
This has nothing to do with object store (which is WAY to slow for video production) or cloud scale.
This is simple LAN and multi-site video production.
There are plenty of ethernet and Fibre video storage arrays to choose from in Australia.
Lower end you have ProMax and Tiger Tech, mid and higher end is EditShare, SmallTree, Islon, SNS and GBLabs.
They all have a presence here and a solid video production background.
Not sure why they went with HDS which does have some fine enterprise arrays but not tailored fro the video market.
They need consistent concurrent 500MB/s to 800MB/s to the a range of edit suites which will be using Avid or Premier or maybe even FCPX. (SBS use it!!)
That means some serious internal bandwidth as well as Cat6a, Cat7 or OM4 Fibre cabling along with very read heavy caching to allow editors to scrub through timelines etc…
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 15:46 GMT LowRez
They need consistent concurrent 500MB/s to 800MB/s
For most fast turn around edit jobs a high quality H.265 reference stream in the edit suite would be fine. Finishing and colour grading a drama production would require the very high data rates you mentioned. Nvidia did an excellent demo a few years back with Maya 3D being hosted remotely in "the cloud". The 3D artist accessed Maya via a remote desktop app on a local thin client. You just rented GPU/CPU/Storage as per project requirements. The ABC glitch/freeze issues are probably derived from the project brief itself. Having full res video available anywhere anytime sounds good in a sales pitch but most TV post workflows can easily accommodate downloading full res footage prior to the edit session commencing.
A HDS spokesperson said "We need to consider the format of media being used and how it has evolved over 50 years."
No you don't. Just digitise it. What they did 50 years ago is irelevant.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2016 21:19 GMT pblakez
Re: Once Again Aus Gov / Gov Corps ignore Open Source used at Cloud Scale
while you are right on network bandwidth you don't understand ceph which can be configured as a flash storage array and / or spinning disk, the nodes can be in your workstation, as well as dedicated storage appliances
we use it in a lan setting at a no of clients doing cad and video, nodes can also be given much larger RAM caches, you can build off the shelf 128GB Ram, 12 Flash Drives, 4 10GB nicks, Dual Xeon CPU
only limited by your imagination and ability
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Sunday 21st February 2016 21:27 GMT JohnMartin
Re: Once Again Aus Gov / Gov Corps ignore Open Source used at Cloud Scale
"only limited by your imagination and ability" ... And your budget, and your rackspace
4PB of SSD (even commodity stuff) would be prohibitively expensive just for the drives let along the compute and the dedicated CLOS network for the hundreds of nodes you'd need to make it perform acceptably, combine that with the fact that video doesn't compress overerly well, and that you'd really want to triple mirror that in a CEPH cluster, and you're looking at about 12PB of SSD.
SSD' are wonderful, but in terms of price/performance for sequentially read data, spinning rust still wins (at least for the moment).
I'd be somewhat surprised if this turned out to be an HDS storage hardware problem, my guess is that the problem is more likely to be related to something like a global file system they're layering on top of it, which may very well be something like GPFS ... which coincidentally is open source too.
Regards
John
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
