Have the chance to buy a dedicated 3D file server, worth it?

[justinanderson]

Hi All-

I run the 3D and VFX departments at a small studio, we specialize in architectural visualization, animation, video, and motion graphics. Currently we use C4D and 3DS Max with VRay, After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut, and a few other packages. I have about 5 people under me who all have mac-based workstations running Bootcamp with windows 7 and ATI video cards, most of which are no more than a couple years old. We connect through a gigabit ethernet connection to a central server that houses both our 3D and VFX files, the 2D departments files (they do a lot of large-scale indesign and photoshop work, think billboards and advertisements), and various other business related files that our producers access. We also have a 5 node mac-based renderfarm that currently only works with C4D, but would like to switch them over to windows to get backburner working.

 

My accounting department has ok'd the purchase of a dedicated 3D server, which is something I have been wanting to get for years. Currently the whole office works over the network on files on an enterprise server, including 3d, so no local files are being used. Our main server gets hammered quite a bit and I am hoping that getting a dedicated 3D server will help, we also do not use texture paths other than to default texture directories, so getting a central server that we can load textures from across the board would be an organizational godsend (this has not previously been possible due to a mix of Windows and OSX users).

 

So here is the dilemma, I get a certain amount of budget to spend each year, would it be worth it to buy a file server or spend it on other things such as quadro cards for my workstations, or even a beefed up renderfarm? Can I run NetRender, backburner, and whatever other render farming off the same server that is serving our files, or would this cause a bottleneck? What about video and motion graphics files, is it still better to work locally or has server tech caught up that working over a network is now not an issue?

 

This server would become a hub for all our visual files minus the 2d stuff, so video, 3d, and after effects files. This will be the first time I get to build up a server from scratch professionally, I havn't built a server since the days of quake 2 so I am a bit behind in the technology and what is feasible now. Thanks for any advice!!

[Francisco Penaloza]

Hi,

where I work (Architectural Firm) we have a separated server for all Visualization related work, years a go when we render we just kill all network connection for everybody else, so a separated server is a must!

Now little by little we scaled our images sizes and video quality, while we worked in our latest video FullHD or half HD the network transfer speed got really slow, also the hard drives speed can't be fast enough, adding to that our render farm spitting frames at the same time we try to do compositing on After Effect, everything gets to a crawl.

for us and also in your case, a speedy scsi server it is need it, adding fast solid state drives to the work station will help a lot, also investing on some IOFX cards for works station or server will be ideal (http://www.fusionio.com/solutions/entertainment/)

and finally a solid software to control a render farm such Deadline or so, Backburner is ok for small scale farms but is not compatible with MAC or many other applications, and since is attached to Max updates it get really buggy every release for us over 30 computers you start to getting several random errors.

[justinanderson]

Cool, thanks for the feedback! Looking into deadline right now, it looks promising. I hope it supports VRay for C4D!

[John Dollus]

another vote for Deadline.