yes we use NICs, if a motherboard doesn't have gigabit on board, we add a gigabit NIC or two
all devices are connected via unmanaged gigabit switches - you see, everything is copper, no fibre, no optical, but make sure your cables and connectors are high quality.
the plug for this type of connection is RJ45, it is downward compatible with 100 and 10 Mbit devices (also the switches), routers do only connect the office network to the internet.
everything is using TCP/IP, which i'd recommend to configure manually to avoid surprise with *selfconfiguring abilities*.
a fileserver doesn't need to be a very powerfull machine, it has just to offer a lot of channels to attach storage devices.
christian

I'm trying to think this through in case I'm missing something: is there an advantage to storing the samples on a server if the V.I. player runs on one machine only? in other words, you're not distributing the processing or memory over multiple machines, are you?

you are right, nick - no, it's only an organizational question where to store data.
christian

I'm bumping this thread. I'm looking at an Infrant ReadyNAS RAID 5 server for my samples. The idea is that sample libraries would be available to both my Mac and PC (VI dongles plugged into each, of course).

http://www.infrant.com/products/products_details.php?name=ReadyNAS%20NV

I guess I'm just looking for assurances and success stories about running samples over Gigabit. The most I've done over internet so far is MIDIoverLAN, and I've gotten some stuck notes. (Using 10/100, though). I assume a Firewire drive delivers 50MB/sec, where these servers can do 32MB/sec. Is that enough?

Synthetic, we had an article in Virtual Instruments magazine a few issues ago by Jesse White, who was the tech at a high-pressure TV composing studio for a long time. He had everything connected by gigabit ethernet and FX Teleport.

It wasn't 10/100, but ethernet cards are cheap.

this device looks basically fine, but you have to consider a few things regarding sample streaming and i would strongly recommend to get feedback from someone using this device succesfully in a real-world environment.
- this devices usually run some kind of embedded LINUX
- the internal filesystem is assumably ReiserFS
- therefore they do support neither HFS+ nor NTFS via network
- CIFS/SMB and AFP are the protocols with the largest overhead
- video streaming is another access-trype than sample streaming
- i could not find any absolute performance numbers (throughput)
- mentioning RAM size points to extensive caching behaviour, which is not the best behaviour when it comes to sample streaming, so try to get some thoughput figures for requesting tiny portions (eg. 128, 64 or even less kB) from large files (several MB), get some info if and how caching behaviour would be configurable

i'm just pointing all this out to avoid possible disappointment ...
christian

Thanks again for your help. I'll try to find this information from their forum.

cm, would having one network fileserver for our 8 Mac Mini work?

In other word, if we stored all the samples on a network drive, in a gigabit network, would that be a viable solution to stream samples from?

What kind of difference would that make from having the samples on the system (SATA) drive?

Jerome

Well, in the mean time I have my four computers connected via a 4 channel WLAN Router. However, after what cm said at the beginning of this thread, I never tried to stream the samples over the router from another computer, but I may test that soon.

The router model is a: ZyXEL P-660HW Series

.

angelo, the 660HW has a built-in 10/100 Mbit switch (means each port can transport a maximum of 100 megabit/sec) - one stereo channel 24 bit 44,1 kHz needs ~2 mbit/s, so in theory you can transport almost 50 *voices* simultaneously (subtract at least 20% for real life)

conclusion: forget 100 Mbit network for streaming (and of course WLAN too) - it's just good to copy something from A to B or browse the internet ...
christian

So, in theory, a gigabit network would be fine?

What about the hard drive perfomances - if you're accessing it from numerous computers at the same time - isn't it going to be a problem?

Jerome

my advice would be: don't toch such a configuration without knowing, or at least having someone who knows - too many factors to consider (not some network technician but someone who also knows how sampling works)
of course then harddrive performance will become an issue (but sometimes it is already on the local computer).
gigabit is basically fine, theoretical 500 *voices* to stream possible (remember: subtract at least 20% overhead / headroom), but often computers do not even get such a data throughput over their internal bus ...

the best method would be: KIS - keep it simple. share only data which would be redundant otherwise and keep heavily used samples as close as possible to your processor ...
christian

Ok, thanks - good to know.

I am not sure this is totally related, but in terms of *where* the samples are being stored, would you recommend :

1/ On the SATA system drive
2/ On an external, (IDE) FireWire drive?

Jerome

I think that for this purpose classic Ethernet connection is a no way !

iScsi should work, but it will be cheaper and more simple to put a hard disk in (or near) the computer.

Wouldn't the ultimate system for the VI's be one that utilized Fiber Channel? Have the samples on a dedicated server (Xserve) using 3-3GHz Mac Pros connected via Gigabit Ethernet on a LAN. I think all doubt about throughput would be solved; and you would have one of the most powerful, kick a%$ work stations on the planet.

for fibre channel some things have to be taken in consideration:
- we currently see the move in fibre channel technology from 1 Gbit over 2 Gbit (like XServe has) to 4 gbit and you hou have possible connections over copper or optical cable.
- there are 2 possible network designs - switched fabric or arbitrated loop.
- usually fibre needs 100 MHz 64bit PCI-cards to make use of the full bandwidth (would be hard to get for notebooks), some cards are compatible to 32bit 66 MHz slots but then would not gain the full performance.
- fibre switches are significantly more expensive than ethernet switches
- XSERVE has to be configured to not cache data, otherwise the theoretical performance will not be available for sample-streaming.

doesn't sound like an easy studio-setup i'd say ...
christian

The other problem is that xSan technology is not compatible with ProTools. If you want to have a central data server and use ProTools, it is better to use solutions based on iSCSI (like GlobalSan from StudioNetworkSolutions).

Jerome

I was speaking of desktop Macs. Thanks, you guys just stopped/saved me from spending a lot of $$$. [H]