Networking question

[danb4026]

I have 6 computers all accessing my home/office network, some wirelessly, and some thru ethernet directly to router.

 

Here's the main question:

 

DOES adding a Network Storage Device (i was thinking of a D-Link DNS-323) have any benefit over my current setup for DR? Which is as follows:

 

My 3 primary machines that are used with Max and distributed rendering are hooked directly to my router via ethernet. In order to have consistency and speed, each computer has it's own H: drive with exactly the same files, folders and paths. These paths contain all of my Max files, images, materials, etc. So when I DR, I just have a path that each computer understands and accesses on its own. I do NOT use UNC to have the computers access a shared drive.

Obviously, the problem with this setup is that each computers drives are consumed with massive amounts of duplicated data and I have to make sure the drives are synchronized.

 

Is accessing a network storage device slower? Does it create any complications, etc. It would be nice to free up resources on my machines.

 

If there is benefit, is there a specific device that is recommended?

Edited March 27, 2009 by danb4026
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[BOXXLABS]

These days, typically, scene files and all related assets (HDR files, image maps, etc) are kept in a single, central, location.

 

When a distributed/network render job is submitted, the rendernodes are instructed to simply go get whatever they need from that location.

 

This is probably the most efficient way to work, and most modern rendering engines and queue management systems support this methodology by default.

 

This said, here are some recommendations to help keep things running smoothly:

 

1) keep all the rendernodes, render "rnanagers" and "servers" (location(s) of the scene assets) on the same GigE network "segment". If you have all the machines plugged into a single network switch or hub, you're probbaly good to go in this respect.

 

2) If you are using very large (or very many) textures and source images, you will probably want to make sure that these assets are on a fast drive array so that the process isn't drastically slowed down by mutliple rendernodes all requesting huge files at the same time. I don't know if I would put the D-Link DNS-323 in this class, but it may work fine for your needs nevertheless.

 

3) Be sure that the cantral location with all the scene files/assets gets backed up regularly or is on a system with redundant or fault-tolerant (such as RAID1, RAID01, RAID5, etc) capabilities. Some "NAS" drives can support this but not the cheap ones. I believe the D-Link DNS-323 has some of this capability.

 

Godd Luck!

 

Adam

BOXXlabs

[danb4026]

Adam, thanks. Do you have a recommendation of a product that meets all of the specs that you describe? But this would be for a home office with 1 manager and 2 servers, so 3 total machine doing DR, not some big office with many workers.

[BOXXLABS]

the easiest and least expensive route to go is to buy some new hard drives (and preferably a RAID controler card) and throw them into one of the existing computers.

 

If you bought 4 drives, you could do a RAID01, with two mirrored RAID0 stripe sets. This would provide total fault tolerance and good performance.

 

If you don't have the $ or room inside your chassis, then just two drives in simple RAID1 (mirror) configuration would provide fault tolerance and probably adequate performance as long as your textures aren't huge. Most modern motherboards support RAID1 with the built in, onboard RAID controller (although the write performance would almost certainly be pretty slow)

[danb4026]

What makes me hesitant is that prior to putting all of my files on all of my drives, I had them in a central location on my main machine. So all of the machines accessed that drive via UNC for maps and materials.

 

It was very slow!!! I hated it. And that was with a dedicated 1TB drive for just scene files on the main computer. Thats when I decided to creates drives on each machine with the same drive letter and paths. I saw an immediate, dramatic increase in rendering speed.

 

I am afraid that if I go the NAS route, or doing what you say in your previous post, I would be back at a snails pace.

 

Is there something drastically different about using a NAS or adding a couple of drives the way you are referring, that would preclude the drop in performance?

[Jeff Mottle]

What makes me hesitant is that prior to putting all of my files on all of my drives, I had them in a central location on my main machine. So all of the machines accessed that drive via UNC for maps and materials.

 

It was very slow!!! I hated it.

 

Windows file shares are very slow. I set up an old machine on a GigE network with a raid array and just used a simple windows file share to share it to my workstation. It was very slow.

If you use a NAS with a dedicated fileserver it will work MUCH MUCH better. Many of the turnkey NAS systems(like the one you have posted) have linux based fileservers built into them, so they will be considerably faster. In my last interation of my NAS, it was suggested that I do a software RAID configuration using the Linux based fileserver called OpenFiler. Blazing fast, and I don't have to worry about finding a compatable/current RAID card when it fails.

[Jeff Mottle]

I've not used one, but there is a company out there called Drobo that has a proprietary RAID NAS system that looks pretty cool http://www.drobo.com/. They main benefit is the way their RAID works. It's a lot more flexible to add more storage and to replace failed drives.

[danb4026]

In my last interation of my NAS, it was suggested that I do a software RAID configuration using the Linux based fileserver called OpenFiler. Blazing fast, and I don't have to worry about finding a compatable/current RAID card when it fails.

 

I have no idea what that means...sounds complicated.

 

But Jeff, thanks, I will check out the Drobo thingy and see what is says.

[andyH]

A word of warning, avoid the "consumer" type of NAS boxes if you are going to have multiple users connecting to the shared storage.

 

I have a 1TB LACIE on my home network, connected to a 1GB switch, on the face of it, it should be zipping along, but the fact is the NAS box is slow. If I am streaming a 720p movie and the wife is also trying to use the box we see definite performance slow-downs. I suspect that its due to the array controller on the NAS box, it has four 250GB SATA drives in RAID5 configuration which yields 750GB of space, so not the best configuration for performance, but even so the performance is dissapointing.