The checklist can be downloaded here:

318 CatDV Installation Checklist

For more information about CatDV, related storage issues or other aspects of your technology environment, please feel free to contact your Professional Services Manager or sales@318.com. For more information about 318, see us on the web at 318.com.

ActiveSAN Joined By High-Capacity On-line Storage and Near-line Archive Components for Adaptable Production Platform

LAS VEGAS (Storage Visions), January 9, 2012 – Active Storage, the leader in high-performance storage solutions for media and creative professionals, today announced the mMedia platform, a complete end-to-end workflow storage solution for post and broadcast production.

The mMedia platform centers around an enhanced ActiveSAN high- performance metadata controller appliance, and adds two exciting new products, mRAID and mVault (also announced today, see related releases), along with optimized management software; all were combined and demonstrated for the first time, live, on the Storage Visions show floor to reveal a complete, unified mMedia platform installation.

With scalable performance and capacity, mMedia provides content producers the components to assemble complete storage solutions that meet their individual needs plus the integration and management software that lets them choose the best production tools in the industry. Together mMedia is more than a collection of components; it’s a complete media creation storage platform for storing and managing content from ingest to archive.

“mMedia is the platform of the future for broadcast production,” said Alex Grossman, founder and president of Active Storage, Inc. “mMedia provides an integrated workflow storage platform with the performance, scalability and configuration flexibility to meet nearly every broadcast and post-production facility’s ingest, on-line and near-line archive capability.”

The mMedia platform leverages Active Storage’s strong partnerships with industry leaders by offering an open platform that works with other production solutions.

“The mMedia platform is a very exciting development for the Levels
Beyond Reach Engine,” says Art Raymond, CEO of Levels Beyond. “We deploy to some of the largest and most demanding creative workflow sites in the world, including major MSO’s, Studios, Broadcast Networks and Live Sports distributed globally. We’re very enthusiastic about the potential of deploying our solution leveraging the new mMedia Platform to deliver even tighter integration, speed and management for a more advanced customer experience than exists in the market today.”

“Our technology on Active’s mMedia platform can support significantly more capable Media Asset Management solutions for Adobe Premiere, Apple Final Cut and Avid workflows,” says Danny Gold, VP Client Solutions of Levels Beyond. “The combination of Reach Engine and the new mMedia Platform is a complete game- changing way to deliver cost-effective, seamlessly integrated high- performance archive solutions.”

About Active Storage:
Active Storage, Inc. is the innovative storage leader for media and creative professionals, broadcast, post-production, on-line and archive solutions. Fast, reliable and easy to deploy, Active Storage products deliver a best-of-breed user experience, marrying award-winning industrial design, unmatched speed, reliability and customer service. Ease of use and robust performance make Active Storage the first choice for complex professional storage deployments.

318 is an Active Storage reseller and can work with you to plan for and acquire Active Storage products into your storage environment. For more information, contact your 318 Professional Services Manager or sales@318.com if you do not yet have one.

XSNMP-MIB can be downloaded from GitHub, or directly from Lithium.

Download the XSNMP-MIB.txt file and put it in /usr/share/snmp/mibs. You can verify that the MIB is loaded by running snmpwalk on the system, specifying the XSNMP Version OID. If snmpwalk returns the version, the MIB is installed correctly. If it returns an error about an “Unknown Object Identifier”, then the MIB isn’t installed in the right spot.

bash$ snmpwalk -c public -v 1 my.server.address XSNMP-MIB::xsnmpVersion
XSNMP-MIB::xsnmpVersion.0 = Gauge32: 1


The fact that the MIB was developed by Lithium doesn’t stop us from using it with Nagios, though. You can define a Nagios service to gather the free space available on your Xsan volume by adding the following to a file called xsan_usage.cfg. Put the file in your Nagios config directory.

define service{
host_name xsan_controller
service_description Xsan Volume Free Space
check_command check_snmp!-C public -o xsanVolumeFreeMBytes.1 -m XSNMP-MIB
}


The host_name should match the Nagios host definition for your Xsan Controller. The service_description can be any arbitrary string that makes sense and describes the service.

The check_command definition is the actual command that’s run. The -C flag defines the SNMP community string, the -m flag defines which MIB should be loaded (you can use “-m all” to just load them all), and the -o flag defines which OID we should return. “xsanVolumeFreeMBytes.1″ should return the free space, in MB, of the first Xsan volume.

The first question should always be, “Do we need to implement a new solution?” In many cases, and at least for now, the answer may be “No, not yet.” There will come a time, however, when the needs of the workflow, software, hardware, or some other factor will necessitate a new Digital Asset Management (DAM) System implementation.

Once the decision has been made to deploy a new DAM, many additional questions will arise. How do we keep our metadata intact? Can we re-use our clip and edit proxies? How do we keep our current automations? 318 can work with you to address these issues. We are asking ourselves the same questions with an eye towards minimizing the hassles associated with migrating such a major piece of infrastructure.

318 has spent the last year evaluating many of the DAM solutions in the marketplace, with an emphasis on whether or not the solution is an appropriate replacement for Final Cut Server in terms of cost, functionality and scalability, and after many internal discussions, CatDV best matched these criteria. In terms of cost, CatDV is one of the most affordable solutions in the marketplace. In terms of functionality, CatDV matches or exceeds the functionality of Final Cut Server. In terms of scalability, CatDV far exceeds the capabilities of Final Cut Server.

The final link in the chain is migrating data and recreating workflows from Final Cut Server to CatDV. 318 has the facility and ability to migrate your metadata with a minimum of user intervention. We also have the ability to analyze your Final Cut Server workflows and re-create the functionality in CatDV, including shell scripting and highly customized workflow integrations for ingest and archive.

We are a CatDV authorized reseller, and have staff trained by CatDV personnel. 318 stands ready to spec, deploy, configure and maintain your CatDV solution and help you with the transition from your Final Cut Server to CatDV. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for a demo and discussion of what CatDV can do for your video workflows.

Finally, 318 is working with other vendors to continue expanding our portfolio of SAN and DAM solutions. Keep on the lookout for what will hopefully be a few other additions once our thorough vetting process has been completed! If you would like further information on any of this, please feel free to contact your Professional Services Manager or sales@318.com if you do not yet have one.

For more information on the new Promise x30, see:

http://www.promise.com/storage/raid_series.aspx?region=en-US&m=1053&sub_m=sub_m_8&rsn1=40&rsn3=48

To discuss how 318 can assist your organization in leveraging these new tools from Promise, from integrating a fleet of MacBook Pros with Xsan to bolting on additional storage for the always-full Xsan, contact your 318 Professional Services Manager, or sales@318.com if you do not yet have one!

318 is an Active Storage reseller. Please feel free to contact your Professional Services Manager or sales@318.com if you do not yet have a Professional Services Manager and we will work with you to find the best solution to any and all Xsan client needs.

ClipTouch, from Factorial in New Zealand is a slick, sleek client for Final Cut Server. Per the Factorial website, it supports:

– No server configuration required
– Search and discover assets
– Directly download and view clip proxies
– Supports the default proxy setting
– Clip timecode display
– Change asset metadata
– Browse and add annotations
– Archive and Restore assets to any archive device
– Respects permission sets based on your login
– Supports direct and VPN connections

After using it to view some assets were optimized using the special compressor settings that Factorial posted, I have to say that I’m impressed with how well it works and with how the interface just looks plain sexy. A job well done! Check it out on the App Store.

Because the make-up of a storage pool is drastically altered when a bandwidth expansion is performed, the data is not properly distributed across any of the new LUNs that were added to the pool, this results in a shadow-effect where all capacity of the storage pool is not available for use by the system. Because of this, it is an absolute requirement that a defrag routine is ran. To perform this defrag, we use the standard snfsdefrag command, but we use the special ‘-d’ flag, which ensures that this shadowed storage space is reclaimed and that data is properly distributed across the storage pool:

snfsdefrag -dr /Volumes/MyXsanVolume

There are several scenarios where it may be desirable to rebalance the data on an existing volume. A capacity expansion of a volume will result in one or more new storage pools being added to the volume, but the new storage will not have any data written to it. Alternatively, an allocation strategy of round-robin or fill can, over time, result in a poor distribution of data across your storage. By spreading data across the storage evenly, you ensure that all disks are running at similar capacities, therefore netting more consistent performance across the volume, as disk performance tends to degrade as capacity increases.

When an snfsdefrag is ran, it will defragment files as specified by your parameters, and these files will be distributed onto the volume as per your allocation strategy. If you defragment a volume that has a ‘Fill’ allocation strategy, you will not gain any benefits of having evenly distributed data, though your individual files will no longer be fragmented.

Thus, if your main goal is balance all data across the volume, it will be necessary to change the volume’s allocation strategy to Balance and then defragment the volume. This will result in fragmented files to be relocated the lowest-capacity pool, an extremely effective method for balancing data. In Xsan 2.x, you can change a volume’s allocation strategy at the GUI level, which can be changed while the volume is live. In our experience, the change can be performed live and will not result in Xsan client service interruption to the volume, and active transfers proceed with no disruption. Even so, it’s best to perform the switch at a time when there’s minimal activity (preferably none) on the volume and no active transfers in progress.

Once you’ve converted the volume to the new strategy, you can proceed with the optimization, which is a fairly straightforward defrag performed with the command

snfsdefrag -r /Volumes/VolumeName

This will defragment any files with more than one extent, re-provisioning the optimized files to the next LUN in the allocation strategy. And because we’re now using the Balance strategy, the next LUN will always be the one with the lowest capacity—-our new LUNs, in this case. If, however, you had a healthy Xsan volume, this command may not properly balance data, because fragmented files will be rare. In such an event, run the command

snfsdefrag -r -m 0 /Volumes/VolumeName

This will defragment files with more than 0 extents, which is every file on the system, letting you rest assured that the volume will be nicely balanced at the end of the operation. The main trade off here is that doing so re-provisions all files on the volume, which can be a very time consuming task. If the volume has standard levels of fragmentation, running the command without the flag should do a decent job of balancing without having to operate against non-fragmented files as well.

But if you do have 2 SANs, completely separate from one another, you cannot then have a client on both. Therefore, having multiple SANs isn’t exactly MultiSAN. MultiSAN means going from having a single metadata controller that controls your entire environment to having a slightly more object-oriented approach to metadata controllers. Which brings us to the question “do I need MultiSAN?” My answer is an if/then statement. If your metadata controller’s fsm or fsmpm processes are spiraling out of control then yes, you may (or you may have corruption in metadata somewhere. For coming up with the answer to my question I posted an Xsan monitor app awhile back on my apps page. But if your fsm/fsmpm processes barely tip above 1% and you’re still having bandwidth problems then look at stripe breadth/block size, fabric and defragmentation before considering buying a bunch of iron to move metadata controlling off onto dedicated hardware.

Now, if you do decide to integrate MultiSAN then to do so is a very straight forward process. First add the all of the metadata controllers as clients to the SAN. Then, create the volume. When creating a volume you will eventually come to a screen to define Volume Failover Priority. Here, you will see each of the clients that you have installed (in the beginning this might only be the metadata controllers). Check the box for each of the clients that you would like to be a metadata controller (I recommend no less than two but in most installations no more than 3 metadata controllers per volume). In this screen you can then also set priority by dragging each controller higher or lower in the list of controllers. If you only have two metadata controllers then the primary would be at the top of the list followed by the backup metadata controller. When you are satisfied with your configuration click on the Continue button and complete the volume configuration as you normally would. You can also invoke the Volume Priority screen from within Xsan Admin for pre-existing volumes.

This article was initially posted at http://krypted.com/mac-os-x-server/defining-multisan/

The App is available on the App Store.

1. Improved filesystem reliability
2. Improved cvfsck (the Xsan filesystem repair tool)
3. Resolves QuickTime reporting “invalid public movie atom found” on playback
4. Eliminates “An unknown disk has been inserted” message when mounting Xsan volumes (occurs in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only)

Whether you are a BRU, Atempo, Bakbone, Backup Exec or Retrospect environment, 318 can assist you with planning, testing, verifying or restoring backups. Contact your 318 account manager today for more details.

One of the most marketable and best features of Final Cut Server is that it is a way to catalog assets. These assets can be stored anywhere you want, provided that they are reliably accessible by the server. Given a username and password, users of Final Cut Server can then access the assets whether or not they can actually get to them using server shares or flat file systems. This allows Final Cut Server to bring logic to an otherwise chaotic form of storing data.

Once catalogued you can then tag assets with metadata. This means that when you go to find assets in the future you can do so quickly and easily. You can preview, annotate and then download those assets, no matter where they are stored – even on a Drobo or some large Firewire media sets. And if you decide to edit-in-place in the future, the fact that assets are stored in a logical space (called a Device) means that if you see the value, that you have an easy upgrade into more online media, such as an Xsan volume – but you don’t have to do it all at once to start seeing value.

And value is the key aspect of Final Cut Server. You can spend as much or as little as you need in order to get value out of the product. Sometimes the smallest features are what organizations will derive the most value out of. Not always, but sometimes… And when you see the value of the smaller features you can then make a decision based on your organizations goals and workflows what else will be of value. If you’d like to discuss a Final Cut Server implementation, whether it’s the basic initial installation, complicated workflow integration or custom scripting, contact 318 for more information. We’re here to help, whether or not the implementation is on the cheap.

Vguard, also by Vicom Systems, is based on the technology included in Vmirror, the LUN mirroring solution, but goes a step further. Vguard allows you to setup another Xsan and use that SAN as a backup. We’re not going to go so far as to call it a snapshot, but it’s everything but.

Overall, Vicom integrates well with Xsan and fills some of the holes that the product itself has. For more information on Vmeter, Vguard or Vmirror, contact your 318 account manager today.

• Primary Internal Network – 128.221.252.100
• Backup Internal Network – 128.221.253.100
• Netmask 255.255.255.0
• IP of Storage Processor A – 128.221.252.200
• IP of Storage Processor B – 128.221.253.201
• Gateway IP of Storage Processor A – 128.221.252.104
• Gateway IP of Storage Processor B – 128.221.253.104

tail -f system.log

Traditional file systems reside on single devices and require a volume manager to use more than one device to generate a logical or physical volume. ZFS is built on top of virtual storage pools called zpools. A zpool is constructed of virtual devices called vdevs. Vdevs are constructed of block devices that include files, partitions, or drives. Block devices within a vdev can be configured in a variety of different manners, depending on the needs of a user. The storage capacity of all vdevs is available to all of the file system instances in the zpool. This is similar in some ways to how Xsan builds volumes, but more customizable and without a requirement for vdevs to be based on Fibre Channel storage in order to be accessible by multiple hosts.

Quotas can be set to limit the amount of space a file system instance can occupy and a reservation can be set to guarantee that space will be available to a file system instance. This gives some nice features to those wanting to limit access for some volumes while still making sure other volumes have the space that will be required for planned future possible expansions. Other features of ZFS include: snapshots, write-cache, filesystem based encryption (in Alpha stage of development) and checksumming.

While users of Leopard may be disappointed in the fact that ZFS did not make it in the final build, giving greater volume sizes and more features for volume management, rest assured that Apple will be thoroughly testing any new file systems before making them available to the public and that with something as precious as a file system, if it wasn’t ready for prime time then it’s good that it wasn’t included with Leopard. ZFS is still going through changes and is not a completed or matured project by any stretch of the imagination. In /Library/FileSystems you will see that ZFS is not present but the framework for future ZFS is present which can be seen by the introduction of some ZFS binaries to the system. So keep a look out for ZFS in the future and maybe even an SDK from SUN on using it at some point.

Once the data is backed up, you should perform a rebuild of the parity for the array. The partiy is rebuilt based on the data that is on the array. This does not fix any issues that may be present with actual data. In other words, if you were using the Xserve RAID as a local volume it would only repair issues with the array and not also perform a repair disk on the drives. In an Xsan any data corruption could force you to rebuild you volume from the LUNs. You would not need to relabel the LUNs, but you may have to rebuild your volume

In many situations you will be able to simply swap the bad drive out with an identical good drive and configure it as a hot spare. Then the Xserve RAID will automatically begin rebuilding the array, moving it from a degraded state into a healthy state.

However, there are often logical issues with drives and arrays. Also, hot spares do not always join the degraded array. In these situations you may need to manually rebuild an array. To do this:
Silence the alarm on the Xserve RAID.
Verify that you have a clean backup of your data.
Verify that you have a clean backup of your data again or better, have someone else check as well.
Open up your trusty Xserve RAID Spare Parts Kit and grab the spare drive module.
Remove the drive module that has gone down (typically the one with the amber light).
Install the new drive in your now empty slot.
Open RAID Admin from the /Applications/Server directory.
Click on the RAID containing the damagemed array.
Click on the Advanced button in the toolbar.
Enter the management password for the Xserve RAID you are rebuilding the parity for.
Click on the button for Verify or Rebuild Parity and click on Continue.
Select the array needing to be rebuilt.
Click Rebuild Array and be prepared to wait for hours during the rebuild process. It is possible to use the array during the rebuild process – although if you don’t have to use the array it is probably best not to as you will see a performance loss. During the rebuild the lights on the drive will flash between an amber and a green state.
Once the rebuild is complete, perform a Verify Array on the RAID.
Verify the data on the volumes using the array.
Order a new drive to replace the broken drive in your Xserve RAID Spare Parts Kit.

If the rebuild of the data does not go well and the array is lost then you will likely need to delete the array and readd it. This will cause you to loose the data that was stored on that array and possibly on the volume, so it can never hurt to call Apple first and see if they have any more steps you can attempt. This is one of the many good reasons for backing data up. Just because you are using a RAID does not mean you should not back your data up.

The Verify Array can also be used to help troubleshoot issues with corrupted arrays.

This process has been tested using firmware 1.5 and below for Xserve RAIDs.