Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

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Isaacspedding

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Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

PostWed May 18, 2022 9:30 pm

I am aware the Cloud Store devices are not available yet but they will be soon and our company is interested in getting one.

We approached a local dealer and they had the following to say which I hope someone from BMD can respond to. Our setup is 4 suites running Resolve, 1 Arriscan XT, 1 Diamant and 1 LGSS. I'd like to hear a response regarding the Samba service.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far about the Blackmagic Cloud Store:

b) As advertised, it looks to be a great product, however I do have a couple of concerns. First, Samba (Windows File Sharing) as the communication protocol is fairly inefficient and while it’s possible to tune storage to use it efficiently, most regular IT storage struggles to get much past 50% utilisation at the type of bandwidth we’re talking about. We’ve had issues where other customers have insisted on using their own network storage, and then struggle to get the throughput they think they should.

Blackmagic claims that they’ve engineered their system to saturate the 10Gbps connection, but I’m a bit sceptical and hesitant to recommend it until I’ve had a chance to prove that for myself.
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Jack Fairley

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Re: Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

PostThu May 19, 2022 9:41 pm

Samba isn't slow, spinning disks are slow. BMD says they're using NVMe SDDs in the pods, and a single NVMe SSD can saturate a 10Gb link without breaking a sweat.
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Uli Plank

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Re: Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

PostFri May 20, 2022 7:17 am

And with spinners it's not only about throughput, which can be enough for many codecs, but access times.
As soon as you go PiP or multicam, those are the main issue.
No, an iGPU is not enough, and you can't use HEVC 10 bit 4:2:2 in the free version.

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mpetech

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Re: Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

PostMon May 23, 2022 4:40 pm

Isaacspedding wrote:I am aware the Cloud Store devices are not available yet but they will be soon and our company is interested in getting one.

We approached a local dealer and they had the following to say which I hope someone from BMD can respond to. Our setup is 4 suites running Resolve, 1 Arriscan XT, 1 Diamant and 1 LGSS. I'd like to hear a response regarding the Samba service.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far about the Blackmagic Cloud Store:

b) As advertised, it looks to be a great product, however I do have a couple of concerns. First, Samba (Windows File Sharing) as the communication protocol is fairly inefficient and while it’s possible to tune storage to use it efficiently, most regular IT storage struggles to get much past 50% utilisation at the type of bandwidth we’re talking about. We’ve had issues where other customers have insisted on using their own network storage, and then struggle to get the throughput they think they should.

Blackmagic claims that they’ve engineered their system to saturate the 10Gbps connection, but I’m a bit sceptical and hesitant to recommend it until I’ve had a chance to prove that for myself.



On a QNAP NAS with software based RAID, I can get 1GB/s on a single 10Gb connection on SMB share (Windows or Mac).

1.1 GB/s is about the fastest you will get on a 10Gb connection.

I'm confident BM can hit 1GB.
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Hugh-H

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Re: Cloud Store 80TB technical queries

PostSun May 29, 2022 6:56 pm

Hello Isaac,

Are you using Macs?
As mentioned it's not SMB it's various other factors. Note that SMB is now the default network protocol on the last few MacOS versions but you can still use AFP, and AFP is needed for TimeMachine shares. Don't use SMB1 anywhere, use SMB2 or 3. I don't know what version the Cloudstore uses.

We don't have a Cloudstore so the following comments are made based on our experience with network shares and Macs.

- If your server supports it and you're on a closed network you can disable packet signing. This makes a large improvement on Mac 10G transfer speed. I don't know if the Cloudstore has packet signing enabled, forced, or not enabled. Someone will find out eventually.

- If your Windoze users are tired of it you can disable the writing of .DSStore files to the server by your Macs. This will speed up Mac access times but will impair Spotlight searches on your NAS.

- Note that attempting 10G transfers to/from many Macs, if the NAS can handle it, will be slowed down by the local write speed. No matter what the specs of a local drive say, or Apple says, many local drives can't do sustained 10G transfers. Later Macs have gotten faster at that. It also requires a decent amount of cpu to parse through all that data during transfers and SMB is mostly single-threaded and often uses the first core.

My opinion only not having seen one yet - it's an interesting product that's priced quite competitively to high capacity SSD NAS units but missing many of the features we need on a high speed NAS in our broadcast environment - user permissions, shared folder permissions, etc. We never can have all our media files exposed to everyone on the network, different folks need different permissions. We also have multiple subnets and, for example, our producers on the public lan need to access screener versions, but the NAS is on the 100G media lan not internet connected, so can we L3 route, and what will the Cloudstore's broadcast packets look like for the router to filter and allow the public lan folks to access? Maybe we set up a separate server on the public side, but there may or may not be an easy way to automate that transfer from the Cloudstore since the normal *nix functions won't be available on a Cloudstore. Etc. So we'll see where the Cloudstore develops.

Good luck,
H

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