A blog about archives, storage and everything

Category: Storage

Install P5 on the Jellyfish
TL;DR

You can easily install Archiware P5 backup and archive software on a Lumaforge Jellyfish storage server. Once you’ve done that you can backup to tape or disk or the cloud directly or through another P5 server. Backups are good. Archive are good. Restores are better.

P5 install on the Jellyfish (Linux) How-To:

Note: Thank you to Lumaforge’s CTO Eric Altman who gave me some basic instructions to get me going.

Step One: Download the latest Linux P5 rpm file

http://p5.archiware.com/download

Copy the downloaded rpm file to the root folder of your SMB or NFS file share.

Step Two: Install the rpm file

Open Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish. Login as root or as another appropriate user.
```
yum localinstall /mnt/Primary/ShareSMB/awpst554.rpm
```
Step Three: Browse to server on port 8000 to test that the server is up

e.g. https://jellyfish:8000

Or in Terminal and ssh into your Jellyfish and ping your P5 server
```
cd /usr/local/aw 

./ping-server

Pinging PresStore application servers...

  lexxsrv pid: 4840 (server is running)

  lexxsrv url: http://127.0.1.1:8000/login 

Pinged 1 from 1 application servers.
```
Step Four: Decide if the Jellyfish storage will be a P5 client or a server.

Note: If configuring the Jellyfish storage as the main P5 server you may wish to set up a user that only has access to the shared volumes.

For my set up the Jellyfish storage is going to act as a P5 client to a main P5 server on a Mac mini (yes, they are useful for something). The Mac mini is this case is the P5 server and is attached to theOverland tape library via a Promise SANlink2 Thunderbolt Fibre Channel adapter.

Step Five: Set up the Jellyfish storage as a P5 client

Log into your P5 server and add the Jellyfish by the IP known to the P5 server. In this case the P5 server is connected via 1GB to the Jellyfish in Port 1.

Note: You could also choose to plug into the Jellyfish via a 10GB port, but in my setup these 10GB ports are reserved for the edit stations. You should choose what’s appropriate for your setup.

Resource utilization of P5 on the server is low, topping off generally at 1GB of RAM at peak usage. While this does technically take resources from ZFS caching, the impact should be super minimal.

In my observations the CPU never spiked too high while both serving NFS and SMB mount points to multiple Final Cut Pro X workstations even with backups or archive jobs going to tape at the same time.

More Jellyfish P5

See the follow up post on Archiving gotchas with the Jellyfish here
May 14, 2018
I don’t get High — Sierra!

Friends don’t let friends install macOS High Sierra in production. Don’t get High, Sierra.

macOS 10.13 was released on Sep 25, 2017, and almost two months later with only one point release update, it’s still too new for production. Download it on a test machine or two or more, test it with your apps and systems, file bug reports and radars, but for the love of all that is Python and Monty! don’t run it on your production Xsan. Well, at least not yet. Wait until next year. Or as long as you can. Or until the new iMac Pro is released with 10.13 pre-installed or wait until they ship the new Final Cut Pro X 10.4 that may or may not require macOS High Sierra.

With that out of the way, I’ve just upgraded the production Xsan to … macOS Sierra. Yes, macOS 10.12.6 is stable and it’s a good time to install last year’s macOS release. Time to say good bye to macOS el Capitan 10.11.6, we hardly knew ya. Besides guaranteed security updates, stability and the annoying newness of a changed macOS, what else is there? In Xsan v5 they introduced a new “ignore permissions” checkbox for your Xsan volumes. Looking forward to that feature in production. No more Munki onDemand nopkg scripts to run chmod. No more tech support requests for folders, files, FCP X projects that won’t open because someone else used it, owns it, touched it. We’ll see how that pans out. I’ll let you know.

Upgrading Xsan to v5

Step 1. Back up your data

You’re doing this, right? I’m using Archiware P5 Backup to backup the current projects to LTO tape. I’m using Archiware P5 sync to sync the current Xsan volumes to Thunderbolt RAIDs, and using Archiware P5 Archive (and Archive app) to archive completed projects to the LTO project archive. That’s all I need to do, right?

Step 2. Back up your servers

Don’t forget the servers running your SAN! I use Apple’s Time Machine to backup my Mac Mini Xsan controllers. External USB3 drive. I also use another Mac Mini in target disk mode with Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the server nightly. (Hat tip to Alex Narvey, a real Canadian hero). And of course I grab the Xsan config with hdiutil and all the logs with cvgather. Because, why not?! For Archiware P5 backup server I also have a python scripts to backup everything, another scripts to export a readable list of tapes, and BackupMinder to rotate the backups. Add some rsync scripts and you’re golden.

Step 3. Upgrade the OS

Unmount the Xsan volume on your clients or shut them down, disconnect the fibre channel. Do something like that. Stop your volume. Download the macOS Sierra installer from the App Store. Double click upgrade. Wait. Or use Munki. I loaded in the macOS 10.12.6 installer app into Munki and set it up as an optional install to make this portion of the upgrade much quicker and cleaner.

In my case after the OS was upgraded I checked the App Store app for any Apple updates (you can also use Munki’s Managed Software Center to check) and of course there were some security updates. In this case the security upgrade hung on a slow network connection and the server crashed. Server down! I had to restore from Time Machine backup to the point where I just upgraded the server. It took some extra time but it worked (can’t wait for next year’s mature APFS / Time Machine and restoring from snapshots instead).

Step 4. Upgrade Server

After macOS is upgraded you’ll need to upgrade the Server.app or just upgrade the services used by Server (even those not used by Server get upgraded).

Step 5. Upgrade the Xsan

Bur first we have to restore the Xsan config. Don’t panic! It may invoke bad memories of data loss and restoring from backups. Xsan PTSD is real.

Step 6. Upgrade the rest

Next you have to upgrade the Xsan volumes.

New version of Xsan, ch-ch-changes! Ignore permissions check box will remount the xsan with the “no-owners” flag. Let’s test this out.

Upgrade the OS and Server app on the backup controller. Upgrade the OS on the clients using Munki or App Store if you like doing it the hard way. Ha Ha.

Step 7. Enjoy

Plug those Thunderbolt to Fibre adapters back in, mount those Xsan volumes and be happy.

Step 8. Wait for the complaints

The next day the editors walked in and went straight to work with Final Cut Pro X. No one noticed anything. Xsan upgraded. Workstation macOS upgraded. Everything appeared to be the same and just worked. Thankless task but well worth it.

Reference: Apple’s iBook guide here

November 17, 2017
My Thunderbolt Nightmare

It was a dark and stormy night of cables and capacitors when suddenly I heard the door knocking, or was something falling of a shelf? I was in a cramped server room, if you’d call it that, and I was day dreaming, sorry, night terrorizing, of days gone past when I worked in nice big well ventilated server rooms with proper enterprise gear. Oh wait, did I really dream that? Did it really happen? Maybe it was less well ventilated and there were cables strewn about the tall 42U shelves and sometimes we found a Mac hidden underneath spaghetti. Sometimes. I vaguely remember the long shiny metal servers, they talked to me, they sang, a whiny pitch of whale song. Dream on, dream on.

Now. Today. Apple Music on my iPhone plays every single Arcade Fire album in a long playlist, in order. And I follow the white rabbit of Thunderbolt cables. This is my thunderbolt nightmare. Dead drive in a Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus unit, web ticket filed for registered hardware. Legacy. That’s the word they used. Where’s Marshall McLuhan when you need a proper redux of the shit storm you’re in? Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C and everything is possible. Can’t wait to step into that confusing identity crisis. OK, back to the present day when I stared at the red blinking drive, a replacement drive from not long ago dead again, sitting in the last row of a now legacy Pegasus R6 unit. RAID 5, the most dangerous kind, this is what stood between me and uncertainty. The worst kind of RAID. Well, not as bad RAID 0. Raid nothing. Raid 5 is one bad drive away from a bad day. Backups? Hmm, I got those, I got plenty of those, but I don’t want to be tested today. No, not today. Not this bloody day.

I open the Pegasus utility and the GUI wants an update. Hmm, that’s not in autopkg, I think. Why is out of date? Munki let me down. I start to drift, to side shift into adding newer better recipes to autopkg, to tweaking my Munki repo, to what sessions would be awesome at the next MacDevOps:YVR conference. Gee whiz, I love open source, and everyone in the Mac Admins community…. Snap out of! I slap myself in the face. I was hallucinating. Stay on task. I update the Pegasus utility. I stare at the critical reports from one of the three R6 units attached to this Mac Mini server. Did I say server? But it’s so small, so little. It works. It’s magical, kinda neat. Until you stare too close at the back. The Thunderbolt cables go from the Mac Mini to the first Pegasus unit to the SANlink fibre channel adapter to the LTO 6 tape library to the next Pegasus utility to the second SANlink adapter to a third and final Pegasus RAID unit. What’s is going on? Where does this cable go? Let me just follow it to the next jumping off point. My brain slows, the lack of oxygen in this cold machine room start to affect my thinking. I lose my way.

I download the report for the Pegasus unit. I had to unlock a pretty neat lock icon and click on the save report. I upload it to the web support and add it to the ticket. Tech support gets backs to me in a day and said all is good, and to carry on. I can’t. The drive is dead. What are they not seeing? It’s right in front of me. I download the report again. Again the same response. Fine. It’s time to stop messing around and pop open Terminal. Loading up promiseutil I check out the options and switches and get into an argument with myself about the currently valid optionals of letters and numbers that are required. I check my notes, online knowledge base, and try again. It’s broken. It doesn’t work. Stumbling around the command line typing imprecisely incorrect statements gets nowhere fast. I realize that there’s no way for the cli utility to properly change its focus to the broken unit with the busted drive. Both the GUI and the binary are stuck on the one R6 unit and won’t see what’s in front of my face.

I call tech support. This is humiliating. This was supposed to be easy. Drive dead, drive reported, drive ordered, drive replaced, then no one the wiser. Data saved, not dead. Backups not tested. Not today. No, not today. Tech support treats me like the imaginary newbie IT people sometimes treat everyone with. He repeats his instructions to me. He is polite. Download the report. I can’t. It won’t work. Unplug the unit. Plug it into something else. I can’t. The cables. The Thunderbolt cables are everywhere. It’s magical, and daisy-chained, and stuck. “Can I remote in and see?” he asks, hoping to resolve this quickly. Sorry. That’s impossible. Even if I thought it was a good idea. I remind him that I have a dead drive. That’s why I called. I want to get a replacement drive. “Sorry sir that legacy unit is not under support most likely,” I know that. I realize that now. That I wasted my time. It happens sometimes. The truth is staring at you. You need a mirror to see. “You need to order compatible drive from the compatibility list.” I am a well spring of emotions. I thank him. I am nice. He was polite. But now I know what I need to do. Oh wait, what? Order a drive now! Order two.

McLuhan never had a chance to evaluate Thunderbolt storage technology but the insane genius and simplicity of Thunderbolt reduced expensive enterprise fibre channel storage to the dust bin. Magical SAN for video editing with a Mac Mini and Thunderbolt RAIDs. Cheap enough to buy with a departmental credit card, fewer meetings to attend, more films to shoot and edit. Backup, archive, repeat. McLuhan would have no doubt reminded me that the tetrad of technology would have flipped Thunderbolt on its head, Fibre channel never went into a dust bin, but was firmly relegated to well cooled storage room, and long ago legacy drives in the enterprise units are humming a long while the cursing wind and emotions swell over the Thunderbolt mountain. Fibre channel just became cool again. Retro smart.

August 1, 2017
Archiware P5 and Synology NAS.

Update: As of version 5.4.3 there is an official P5 add-on package for Synology NAS

Archiware P5 available for Synology

Note: The P5 app for Synology NAS first debuted with P5 v.5.3.3

On the Archiware P5 new-features page there’s a blurb about the Synology NAS integration:

From Version 5.3.3, Archiware P5 supports Synology NAS devices without restrictions.

Synology NAS can serve as a data source or target for P5 Synchronize, P5 Backup and P5 Archive. The Archiware P5 application can now be installed on the Synology NAS itself.

Thanks to the snapshot capability of the DSM platform, powerful enterprise Synology NAS devices can also be used as repository for Backup2Go. This setup opens the possibility of introducing a professional data security solution at an affordable price point.

Let’s look in closer detail how to install Archiware P5 on a new Synology NAS.

For this post I have a new Synology 1515+ NAS, installed with five 6TB hard drives (It is very easy to install hard drives. No tools required). Note: I’ve purchased the NAS with my own money and was not paid to write this article.

At the time of this blog post the latest Synology DSM release is 6.1 and Archiware P5 is at version 5.4.2.

Step 1. Download Synology package from Archiware.com/download

Download Archiware P5 for Synology

Requirements are DSM 5.2+ and Intel x86 64-Bit CPU only. (i.e. Atom but not Marvell).

Step 2. Find and Log into your NAS

Find your new NAS with the Synology Assistant app or use this handy website link:

Find your NAS

I had no luck with the app (it found my existing NAS, but not the new one). Using the website I was able to quickly locate the new NAS that I need to log into and setup. Very nice feature.

Step 3. Install the new DSM

Install or update new software. You will be prompted to go through the initial setup to prepare your new NAS.

Step 4. Set up a new volume

Chose the Btrfs or ext4 filesystem. Btrfs supports snapshots, replication, and much more.

Step 5. Monitor the volume setup

Verifying the hard disks will take a moment. Take a break here.

Step 6. Open Package Center

Step 7. Install manually

Install Archiware P5 by selecting the “install manually” option to upload the awpst542.spk downloaded file from archiware.com

Step 8. Agree to continue.

Load the Synology P5 installer by agreeing to continue with this “unknown” publisher.

Sep 9. Agree to trust the installer

Step 10. Confirm the Install

Step 11. P5 is now running on the Synology NAS.

Hooray! P5 is now installed. Select the app to examine the details.

Step 12. Examine the option to stop or uninstall the P5 application

Step 13. Login to the P5 server running on NAS

To login to P5 open a new tab. Pay attention to the port number: “20,000” (vs 8000 on other platforms such as Solaris, Linux, OSX etc).

Step 14. Set up your NAS as a client on another Server

To test the new Synology 1515+ NAS I then set up the NAS as a client on another P5 server, and set up a P5 Sync job to copy data from server with a ZFS based filesystem to the Synology NAS with a btrfs volume.

Testing: Set up the new client in P5 with a name and IP address, then set up a new sync job with source and destination. Start now. Watch the bits fly through the ether. Be happy.

Step 15. Other things to configure

To make your new NAS is working smoothly don’t forget to set up the email notifications, and set up some AFP, SMB, or NFS shares as required.

Take some time to explore the Package Center app and see what other great applications are offered on the Synology NAS.

Synology makes a great low-cost NAS appliance. For SMB or production setups I would recommend two or more (for redundancy, hot or cold spares, disaster recovery, offsite backups/replication). With P5 installed you can Sync your server data to a NAS for onsite or offsite backups, backup your NAS to tape, or use the NAS for your client workstation backups using Backup2Go. Using the new Btrfs filesystem provides many of the same advances as ZFS, including snapshots and replication, over traditional filesystems such as ext4 and hfs which sadly lack these features.

Conclusion:

The Synology NAS is a great experience. Adding Archiware P5 is a recommended way to include this NAS as part of any good backup, archive or DR (disaster recovery) scenario. Two thumbs up. Way up.

References:

Archiware P5 new features

Synology DSM

March 4, 2017
Best of 2015: VidiXplore

This is another great product of 2015 and when I found it, I thought VidiXplore proves that Media Asset Management could be done better and simpler. At the end of December 2015 they released version 1.0 with new some tricks, including some changes to make a migration from Final Cut Server a reality. Time to move some clients!!

To sum up VidiXplore, I’ll quote my tweet from Dec 21, 2015:

Finally the perfect solution for simple asset management! Keep proxies in the cloud, originals local. Search + share!

Working with video editors, animation and visual effects studios, I’ve come to realize that media asset management (MAM) systems can be complicated and painful. Changing workflow, oh no! Building a better pipeline is not easy, nor is it always welcome. Well, hello from the other side, we found the solution, or at least part of it.

With VidiXplore you have 3 steps:

Step 1. Manage your videos by keeping all the originals local. Use your own storage. Use your folder structure. Use your vids as you would normally. Don’t pay for cloud storage.

Step 2. Proxies (thumbnail vids) go into the cloud to be viewed by you and your team.

Step 3. Organize your videos and photos into collections, batch edit by adding tags to add metadata, search for particular assets and share them with colleagues and external clients.

That’s it. You’re already ahead of the game. We skipped right over step 4 which was “have a lot of meetings to debate proper metadata” and step 5 which was “convince everyone at the company to adopt a different workflow.”

With VidiXplore you switch to a monthly payment model, that is true. You don’t own the cloud platform, but what you gain is that you don’t pay a lot of money upfront to set up a large server (or many large server), nor do you need render farm for video transcoding nor for the databases you need to keep track of it all. Pay monthly. That’s the way for a lot of smaller companies. Lower up front starting cost. No extreme capital outlay in the beginning.

Honestly, VidiXplore is a refreshing and easy way for so many people to use asset management now, so why not try it? Harder to say that with a large system setup that costs a lot of money to set up, only to find that no one wants to use it. That’s not what anyone wants.

And now for something completely different…

Let’s take a quick look at VidiXplore. If you’ve installed the VidiXploreAgent-1.0 agent then you’ll have a nice “V” icon in your menu bar (Mac) or system tray (Windows). Use this to open the VidiXplore agent.

In the VidiXplore menu you can access the settings where can you set whether certain file types get a Cloud Copy uploaded by default or how many concurrent jobs can run at once.

When the agent is open you’ll see folders you’ve configured for media, and an option to go the website of your particular instance of VidiXplore.

For the first web login you’ll see an intro screen which allows you to upload additional media to VidiXplore (that is, in addition to any particular media folders you’ve configured in the agent) and the option to connect cloud storage such as S3, Azure or Dropbox. Lastly, there are also the installers for the agent.

Once logged into your website you see a basic layout with options to sort by files or collections, to specify all files or particular types, sort by location and bulk actions.

If we want we can sort the results and see only collections:

Or we can sort by files which have a cloud copy:

So many options to sort, search and find what we’re looking for. Of course, we want to also edit the metadata but not so much that we require weekly meetings to decide on the 500 important and required metadata fields. Just use tags. Of course, meetings are good, and so is process, but it is so quick to select bulk actions and add a tag to a group of objects. Done!

“Finally the perfect solution for simple asset management! Keep proxies in the cloud, originals local. Search + share!”

There’s so much more you can do with VidiXplore, and I’ll go into more detail in another blog post, but this was just a highlight for my best of 2015.

Check out their website for more information:

VidiXplore.com

January 29, 2016
Best of 2015: Archiware P5 Archive app
Announced late in 2015 the Archiware P5 Archive app is a revolution for editors who want to control the archive and restore process. No longer the job of the IT Admin, editors can select files or folders on their SAN volume (or anywhere) and send them to the tape archive.

The Archive app is a brilliantly simple app that allows the right-click services action in OS X, or in another words a it’s a GUI app that presents a contextual menu that knows to how to the talk to your P5 Archive server. When the files are safely on tape the original files on the filesystems are replaced with stub files that can be used to start the restore process.

Requirements: Archiware P5 server with the Archive module setup with an Archive plan. Add to that the P5 Archive App which is installed on the clients.

Note: At the moment all archiving goes over the LAN by default, so if you have a fast SAN then you set up the P5 Archive app client settings as “localhost” instead of their actual client name. That means that when it goes to archive the file, the server knows that the files exist on the SAN at a known path (which is the same on the client and the server).

And now for some detailed steps and screenshots.
1. Archiving completed projects
Choose the completed project folder and right-click. Select “Archive to P5”.

Note 1: If you want to restore files choose the folder that was archived and right-click. Choose “Restore from P5”.

Note 2: Restoring individual files that have been archived is possible by double-clicking the files with the “.p5a” extension, but it will be much faster to select an entire folder to restore than many individual files.

Note 3: For either archive or restore to work the P5 Archive app needs to be installed.

Note 4: To avoid having a services sub menu keep the contextual-menu items to four.

2. Archiving app status

When you are archiving or restoring files the Archive app will show you the status of your request. It will also show you the status of other jobs running on the P5 server. This is to let you know why perhaps your archive or restore is taking a long time (it’s possibly waiting for access to the tape drive and it currently busy backing up or archiving something else).

The P5 Archive app offers you three operations “cancel job”, “list items” and “get report”. The last two are great when you want to examine a completed job, for example. If you want to find out what files were archived in the particular job choose “list items”.

3. Restoring files

Archived files will have either one of or both of, 1) a”.p5a” file extension and 2) a P5 Archive app icon.

Folders and FCP X project bundles (which are folders) do not get the “.p5a” extension, but FCP X projects have the the icon.

Note 1: Files can also be restored by the admin through the P5 web interface. They can be restored in place or to any other location that is required.

Note 2: On the P5 server jobs that are sent to archive or restored from tape show up as “cli job” with the tapes in use. Actual files or folders involved need to be noted from the P5 Archive app not the P5 web admin console. Otherwise checking the P5 web restore tab will files actually archived (that can be restored).

That’s enough for the quick overview of this great new app. One of the best things in 2015.

For more information on Archiware’s new P5 Archive app check out their website:

P5 Archive app
January 29, 2016
2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog, but nobody wants to read no stinkin’ reports so let me just sum it all up: Xsan, Munki, Thunderbolt, Archives. Or is that all one word? Thunderbolt Xsan Munki Archives! That’s better.

Here’s an excerpt from the report that no one will read:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2015. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Surprisingly, or not, that opera would be about Xsan. Yes, Apple’s Xsan is still alive, and Apple even added new features with OS X 10.11 El Capitan. I’m still building Xsan shared storage SANs and upgrading old ones to new versions. That was one of the good news stories of 2015 for me.

You can build an Xsan with one or two Mac Minis and add your storage of choice. That used to mean more often than not the fibre channel storage from Promise. A great choice for larger deployments, the x30 Vtraks are solid.

But the real shocker for me in 2015 was stumbling upon the Accusys Thunderbolt SAN RAID, the A16T2-Share. For more than half off the price of a similar fibre channel storage RAID here’s a magical box powered by unicorns that has four (4) Thunderbolt connections. Plug one Thunderbolt cable into that Mac Mini, format the raid, setup Apple’s Xsan, and then plug the other three (3) Thunderbolt cables into iMacs, Mac Pro, MacBook Pros or any Xsan clients. Wow. Awesome.

Suddenly we have a game changer. An affordable SAN storage RAID for real block-level storage. Now more than ever we can afford to have true collaborative workflows for video editors and anyone in the creative. If you need to work together with fast connections to a shared pool then building an Xsan got much more attractive.

Disclaimer: I got a chance to test the Accusys A16T2-Share. And I would be crazy to recommend something without testing it thoroughly. This was used for several weeks by video editors in production. It was much faster than our 4GB fibre channel storage, of course, but it was also faster than our 8GB FC storage. Speed tests showed we got close to 1GB/sec, and even when it was 97% full we got 700MB/sec. Sa-weet.

I look forward to seeing what Accusys bring to NAB in 2016. What new box will they show up with? I hope for more than 4 client ports and faster Thunderbolt 3. Only 82 more sleeps till we all find out.

Apple’s Xsan and Accusys Thunderbolt storage A16T2-Share were big stars of 2015, but what else stood out? The two other bright shiny lights were Archiware’s new P5 Archive app, and Vidispine’s VidiXplore cloud based MAM. More on those in posts to follow. Both of these products have transformed workflows for editors. Stay tuned!

January 28, 2016
Thunderbolt SAN talk at Mac Admin meet up

Big thanks to Ross at Ping Identity for organizing and Jamf for sponsoring the Mac Admin meetup on September 9, 2015.

We filled the tiny meeting room and we will have to expand to the larger conference room (or theatre) next time. It was a well attended meetup with much discussion of the earlier day’s Apple announcements, new OS X “El Capitan” and iOS 9 changes and how this affects management products like Casper which have had to move the binary because of the new SIP implementation in OS X.

I opened up the meet up with a presentation on Storage, SANs and the new Accusys Thunderbolt SAN A16T2-Share product.

The goal of my presentation was to give a quick overview of SAN technology as I’ve seen it change over the last 10 years: from Fibre Channel, to iSCSI to PCIe and Thunderbolt based. The last change to Thunderbolt based SANs is the most interesting for small video production workgroups or anyone that likes working on small scale shared projects but needs a decent bandwidth at an affordable price. Block level storage (SANs) is straight forward storage tech for users and applications to interact with without having to negotiate network protocols (AFP, SMB, or NFS). It’s never been quite that affordable until now.

Having built a lot of Fibre Channel based SANs for media and entertainment companies and post-production editors in corporate environments I know how awesome and fast and solid these SANs are. Lots of editors and clients can hit a large SAN and it won’t blink. Thirty or Sixty users is not unusual. But not everyone believes in fibre channel or the idea of pulling fibre cables. It is surprisingly a large stumbling block to building large SANs, “no, we don’t want fiber cables”. True, sometimes clients have objected to gigabit Ethernet too, but that’s another story.

I found that iSCSI, especially with the DDP units I’ve set up, has been a great alternative to fibre channel. Not fiber cables to pull. Just use the CAT6 cables already in place. Great Ethernet based SANs using 1 x or 2 x CAT6 cables per client, or even 10G. Works well. Very well indeed. It’s been great for smaller (and larger) clients who want a great Ethernet iSCSI SAN solution without needing fibre channel cables, switches, HBAs, Thunderbolt adapters, etc.

That’s why when I stumbled across the Accusys Thunderbolt storage I was kinda really excited. No fibre channel to Thunderbolt adapters. Just use Thunderbolt cables. Brilliant! Finally a solution for small workgroups. And there’s so many video groups sprouting out of every corporate office, or boutique VFX or post-production shops that have been struggling with small NAS solutions that were not meant for video production. Now you can get that SAN that you’ve wanted, you can really get that block-level storage at an affordable price. Instead of working locally and copying raw footage and finished products back and forth across slow network links they can work in a small video group with high speed storage. Sa-weet. (Can you tell I’m excited?).

I’ll include the presentation PDF here as a link if anyone is interested. I’ve added a link at the end from Accusys on how to build an Xsan with the A16T2-Share. Yes, Xsan from Apple still exists and is bundled with the OS for free. Building a SAN is pretty easy and everyone can do it. Don’t forget your backups though.

Lastly, anyone interested in attending any meetings for the upcoming MacDevOps:YVR (June 16-17, 2016) drop me a note. I added the email in the presentation document.

MatX_SAN_Accusys-Thunderbolt_2015

September 10, 2015
Move over El Capitan, hello Yosemite!

With all this talk about El Capitan, Apple’s as of yet unreleased version 10.11 of OS X, and its wondrous new features in Xsan, I think it might be time to upgrade to last year’s breakthrough version of OS X, Yosemite. Sure, you might be excited by the press releases for the built-in DLC in El Capitan but seriously sane folks stay 1-year behind the bleeding nose upgrades provided by Apple. So if OS X 10.11 is all the rage before its released it must be time to seriously consider upgrading that working Xsan running OS X 10.8 or OS X 10.9.

In my case, I upgraded a working Xsan running on Mac Minis and OS X 10.8.5. Here are some screenshots from the process. As always think worked better than I could have expected, and it is a much easier process that one expects. But stay sharp kids, danger lurks when you wake the dreamer…. Upgrading a SAN is serious business and doing anything like this without proper backups is taking your life in your own hands. In my case, full disk backups on Promise Pegasus RAIDs and full tape backups using Archiware P5.

Download the Yosemite installer form the App Store. Install. Download the new Server.app from the App Store. Install. Now upgrade your Xsan. That’s it. You’re done. No surprises, aren’t you happy? Ha ha. I’m kidding. The fun is just getting started.

If you’re actually following along, this isn’t a step by step recipe. Go to Apple’s site and read this Kbase and check out the migration guide.

Restore Xsan

Step 1 is to launch the new Server.app, find Xsan Admin. Just kidding, it isn’t there. Enable Xsan, and choose to Restore a previous SAN configuration. That wasn’t hard. High five! Actually, we’re not done yet. Set up OD now. Go!

Step 2. Set up your Xsan controller as an Open Directory (OD) master. Does’t matter if it’s joined to another domain, Xsan keeps itself organized in OD, so you need it.

Set up OD

Step 3. Admire your upgraded SAN, “how lovely the flowers do smell…. life is good.”

Xsan list

Step 4. Where did my Xsan admin go? Where do I add clients? Where are my clients? Huh? What? Why did I upgrade a perfectly working SAN to this version? Ha ha.

Take it all in, take a good look at what you’ve done to your Xsan. What? Just so the editors could have the latest version of Final Cut Pro (v.10.2.1) which is only compatible with OS X 10.10.4. I see what you’ve done Apple, very clever indeed. Hmm…

Click on the “Save configuration profile” button and download the profile somewhere. Use this to set up the SAN on your clients. Distribute via Profile Manager or install it manually. Up to you. I haven’t gotten it to work with Munki quite yet. Installing it requires the admin password for the Xsan controller. How convenient.

When you client is configured you’ll see a Profile in System Preferences. Remove it and your client is un-configured. No more Xsan.prefpane to list volumes and mount or unmount them. Nope. That would be too easy. Learn to love “xsanctl”, as in “xsanctl mount Xsan”. Read some xsanctl tips in this Kbase

Step 5. Set up a backup Xsan controller. You have one of those, right? In my case, I had a client which I wanted to promote to be a controller. But first what to do about its status a client of the Xsan?

backup cannot be client

Open Server.app, enable Xsan, join current Xsan as a backup controller and set up a replica OD. Confirm, confirm, confirm. Think about what you’re doing, then do it!

confirm

Apple wizards are the best wizards, uh, i mean Setup Assistants. No wizards here…. So, you’ve setup a backup Xsan controller, and OD replica, and now look in Server.app. How amazing is that… wait, what? Where’d my Xsan volumes go? Huh? Where are the controllers? Weird. Very strange. Not comforting at all.

The Xsan window eventually shows the volumes and controllers, bur geez, almost gave me a heart attack. It’s not like I never seen Xsan go bad before. Xsan 1 nightmare still haunt me. They do. Backups. Need more backups. Archiware P5 Backups, do it now!

OK, you’ve survived the uncertainty of Xsan upgrades…. But wait more minute… cat the fsnameservers (no, it’s not the name of a band, it’s a command). Check it out. Holy smokes, batman. Xsan 4 by default will set your metatadata network to the public LAN, something that’d would be laughed at years ago, but they do it now by default. Of course, upgrading our SAN kept out metadata network the same. But strangely the Xsan backup controller is set to use the public for metadata when the primary controller is not. WTF.

Change your metadata network. Read the Kbase, and once again wield xsanctl like a boss.

July 29, 2015
Affordable Shared Storage: Accusys A16T2-Share Thunderbolt SAN

Accusys A16T2-Share Thunderbolt SAN storage

I’ve mentioned the Accusys A16T2-Share Thunderbolt SAN storage before. I first encountered it at NAB 2015 back in April. It was truly a magical find. A 16-drive RAID unit with 64TB raw storage and ready to be part of your Apple Xsan using Thunderbolt connectors. No Thunderbolt to fibre channel adapters necessary, nor is a fibre channel switch required. Just plugin a Mac Mini as your Xsan controller, and there’s room for 3 other clients to plugin with Thunderbolt. Pretty neat.

It’s not for everyone. There’s a limit to the length of Thunderbolt optical cables. And there’s only 3 clients possible using one last Thunderbolt connection for an Xsan controller. But this could work well for small work groups. The magical 4-seat SAN setup is finally here. Bob Kite, master SAN builder, would be happy.

I’ve just gotten word that this unit is available for sale now, as it was recently certified by both Apple and Intel. I believe the street price is approximately $9900 USD, but don’t quote me on that. Information is still emerging on this new product. I do hope to get my hands on one to do some real world application testing. Including testing resilience to failure (drive removals, raid rebuilds, etc).

If the reliability of the Accusys hardware is good, and backed up with solid support then this could be a great product.

Of course, it kinda goes without saying that all storage, including Shared SAN storage, needs solid backups. My preference where possible is a second tier disk (NAS/SAN/DAS) and tape. My preferred vendor is Archiware which makes the very excellent product P5.

With over 10 years of experience with Xsan and setting up storage systems I have learned to always setup excellent backups. Restoring files when a RAID or SAN fails is crucial. Using an a RAID, such as the Accusys Thunderbolt A16T2-Share, as a SAN would be come with a recommendation from me to all my clients to have a secondary Thunderbolt RAID unit of the same size to sync it daily and to use P5 Backup with LTO 6 tape drives (preferably in a tape library). You never can be too paranoid with a client’s data. That’s what my clients pay me for. To plan for failure. I love setting them with excellent SAN storage, but I must counsel them to build also an excellent backups system. Better safe than sorry.

The price point on this A16T2-Share Thunderbolt RAID is attractive, and when it is released many clients in small shops may very well consider it. At approximately $10K US for 64TB of shared storage with free Xsan 4 it is a pretty sweet deal. Add another $5-10K for a large backup RAID drive, and another $5K for a tape library and $2K for Archiware P5 Backup and the cost adds up. But having an affordable price for the main SAN storage makes this a very real possibility for some clients who have been struggling with editing video on NAS like QNAP, Synology or Drobo.

July 20, 2015