NAS for video editing over network

[litrsport]

Situation looks like
from two separated QNAP's with 6 HDD in raid5, and often from one of them

2 editing stations (Avid)

maybe more in near future
from one separated QNAP's with 6 HDD in raid5
3 stations for graphics (Premiere and After Effects)
2-4 freelancers over FTP
4-6 clients downloading from FTP
files uploading from NAS to FTP for color correction

 

The problem is that it all happens almost simultaneously. And number of  editing stations will only grow
I see solution in custom build machine with bunch of SSD to hold all projects in work and back all staff every night.

For now 1GB lan isn't bottleneck its speed of storage that can't handle such number of simultaneous requests.

[GDRRiley]

grab a 45 drives s45 lite and run that with hdd for backup and long term storage and then get something like the suppermicro 2028R-ACR24L for your ssds

[jkirkcaldy]

Do you need to share the avid projects between the two or more editors at once? Do you need bin locking etc? 

 

Also what's your budget? Storage requirements etc?

 How are you connecting to the qnaps? Is everything coming out of the nas from a single cable or does each workstation have a dedicated connection. 

 

Gigabit lan may be fine now but if you start adding more systems you will run out of bandwidth so will need 10gb ethernet (either now or a free pcie slot to add later) to a switch where everything else will be connected via normal 1gb ethernet.

 

Also how big are your projects? Premiere for example is happy for small projects to be on a network but when you start getting into feature length or high res footage then you need very fast storage. (There's a reason Linus built a nvme ssd raid server to edit from.)

 

The way backup works is slightly different to a normal server and may be similar to something you do now, but we backup all our footage onto two external drives - graids or similar as well as Sony ODA archive drives - so the server isn't backed up itself. Which is common practice in editing work flows. 

 

My advice would be to get something with many drives in a fast and redundant array and you should have more than enough bandwidth without having to deal with two separate servers. (A server /nas for longterm backups is going to fill up very fast.)  The backups should be separated from the server. There is too much that can go wrong with automated backups to leave it to an app.