Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 79
before committing to any tech-
nology.
What makes a good
storage system?
High-performance storage is
easy when you’re attaching it
to a single workstation. When
it’s attached to 10 or 20, that
same performance doesn’t
hold up. With network storage
(NAS), administrators trying to
increase performance often end
up just moving the bottleneck
downstream. The bottleneck
migrates to the backbone or
the network switch, the proto-
col, the buffers, the frame size,
version of TCP-IP or the net-
work file system.
Not All Network
Storage is
Created Equal
By James McKenna,
VP Sales and Marketing,
Facilis Technology
Shared storage has come a long
way since its infancy. Early SCSI
and Fibre Channel systems
were cumbersome and had a
lot of limitations. As technol-
ogy evolved, the long range of
optical Fibre Channel helped to
make it the defacto standard
in shared environemnts, but
Ethernet was emerging. The
RJ45 connectors and twisted-
pair cabling was less expen-
sive, and had enough capa-
bility to satisfy some basic
workflows. Soon facilities had
a choice between traditional
Fibre Channel-based systems
and NAS (Network Attached
Storage) Ethernet-based sys-
tems. As NAS got faster and
cheaper, Fibre Channel started
to wane in popularity.
in NAS systems. However, many
are true to their initial design
as common connectivity for
business machines, and possess
critical flaws and shortcomings
in the content creation space.
Now, broadcasters and facilities
are looking for next generation
storage architecture. There are
some key factors to consider
When you start considering the
process of getting data to the
desktop and how you could
make that faster, the tweak
points are endless. Many a NAS
system has been “repurposed”
to backup duty soon after being
built because the latencies and
inefficiencies just couldn’t be
tweaked away.
Performance is systemic. The
The decline of Fibre Channel
wasn’t a fundamental flaw or
a suitability problem; it was IT
convergence. The last decade
has seen considerable progress
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