Blackmagic Forum

This is a message for any BMD developers who may see this and be in the know about the functionality of this new product!

With the Cloud Store Max 24TB and 48TB models announced, I'm curious about the connectivity possibilities. Given that each Cloud Store Max unit has a 100G Ethernet port, can 2 Cloud Store Max units connect to each other via 100G Ethernet such that up to 8 workstation users plugged into the Cloud Stores via the provided 4 10G Ethernet ports on each unit would each be able to access both Cloud Stores at the same time? I realize that if this is indeed possible, those Cloud Stores would be their own separate storage solutions and not one single pool, but I'm not even sure these units *could* work in this way.

If connecting 2 Cloud Store Max units together directly to work in this way isn't possible, would two Cloud Store Max units connected to the newly announced Blackmagic Ethernet Switch, each via one of the Switch's 2 100G Ethernet ports, be accessible at once via a machine plugged into a 10G Ethernet port on the Switch?

It may very well be that these are scenarios that haven't yet been tested - but considering that one of the promo images on the Blackmagic Ethernet Switch page shows x2 Cloud Store Max 48TB units racked on top of each other below a Blackmagic Ethernet Switch unit, I'm under the impression that this *has* been tested and is indeed possible. Not to mention the copy "Unlimited Storage" and referencing adding "a second store" when describing the Cloud Store Max units on the DaVinci Resolve Replay Editor page.

this is a great question. I am dying to see the Cloud Store Max at NAB tomorrow.
If you were to use a QNAP or Synology, even with an expansion chassis, you would typically make the expander (and certainly a second QNAP or Synology) into a separate volume, and not try to create one
storage pool, so that you would not lose everything in case one chassis died. So at this moment, I am thinking that since there are 100G ethernet ports on the Cloud Store Max, you would plug these into a
QNAP M7308R switch that has four 100G ports and eight SFP28 25G ports, and now the client computers (which can be 10G or 25G) can connect to both. Since the Cloud Store Max would be assigned static IP Addresses, you would simply say on your Mac - GO> Connect To Server> smb://IP of Cloud Store Max 1
or/and smb://IP of Cloud Store Max 2 - and now you would have both Cloud Store Max on your desktop, and you could do your editing.

This, combined with the new v1.2 firmware that finally offers to assign users and shared folders, can really make this a powerful solution. I can't wait to see it in person.

This is the QNAP 100G switch -
https://www.qnap.com/en-us/product/qsw-m7308r-4x

it's $999

Bob Zelin

Striping two together would be awesome. Also, an option to make them Raid 5 or a volume protection mode.

It would be interesting to know what's the maximum throughput you would get, directly connecting a single client in 100GbE in the unit.