So we’ve all heard about it, but at long last the Avid ISIS|1000
turns up (in demo mode) in New Zealand at the office!
The Avid ISIS|1000 is the latest cost effective addition
to the range of ISIS storage products. With 16TB of usable storage, 3 million files and folder count, support for
24 editing clients attached via a switch and the ability to be expanded with 3
additional chassis, this looks to be a very interesting proposal.
What’s in the box?
The first point of interest is that this is a turnkey
solution (well, almost) with the system shipping in a preconfigured 2U chassis.
Even more interesting is the fact that it is based on a Seagate (formally DELL)
HB-1235. The other very interesting point is that for the first time Avid ISIS
appears to be running on Linux! No windows OS in sight.
The ISIS Engine is made up of 12 disks, with 2 disks
being SSD drives (RAID1) for the OS and the remaining 10 being 2TB eSATA media drives.
The media drives as a whole are referred to as Media Packs, and are managed in
some RAID format (not mentioned in any documentation but Avid own RAID design with two parity drives) by the Storage Controller.
Connect up the power cables turn on the PSUs and wait. No
On/OFF button here just some POST and up she comes. A little noisy though I
have to say for such a small unit, but then this is usually the way with units
like this.
Setting up the system
and the first thing you find is that there is no OS set up needed, but rather a
laptop on a specified port, and internet connection for loading the license and
registering. It’s also worth noting that this is running ISIS 5.0 software and
not its bigger brothers versions of 4.7.x. That said when you look at the
system configuration and new OS you can understand why.
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| Set-up is via a web page through the Storage Controller |
Management of the system is almost identical to that of
the other ISIS systems, but as there is no OS interaction this means that the
Control Panels from the earlier models have, in effect, been moved onto the Web
Management interface or may well be hidden inside the BMC (Baseboard Management
System) software which is accessed through another dedicated IP address.
The Manager has a new clean, grey interface with a few
unfamiliar items such as the Media Packs and the Storage Controller. That said
the build process is still very familiar to you if you have ever tinkered with
an ISIS before.
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| v5 software, but a familiar interface - Click the image for a better view! |
Once registered and the software installed, the first
thing to do is build the file system. Once you have file system then you bind
the media pack(s) into the file system. If you have more than a single Engine
then the other should appear in the Media Packs list. From here on out the
process is the same as any other ISIS system building users, groups and
workspaces.
The 10 disks in the Media Pack give you 300MBs of throughput (4 engines giving you 1200Mbs) However owing to the new RAID system used by Avid the ISIS|1000 now uses a 512KB block size (2MB blocks used on the ISIS|5500) making for which makes for a more efficient storage for small audio files (like renders)
and Project information.
The ISIS|1000 (unlike the 7500 and 5500) does not support
any directly attached clients. Currently, the documentation says that either the DELL 2024 or 3024 is
supported, I'm also led to believe that the NETGEAR XS712T is also supported but its not mentioned in the setup guide. I am sure the list will expand, but a 10Gb
connection is needed to go between the Engine and the switch, no 1Gb
connections here! Both DELL switches support both 1Gb, 2Gb, 10Gb and
20Gb client connections, remembering that you also need a 10Gb connection back
to the Engine from the switch!
ISIS Client connection software looks identical and can
be downloaded from the ISIS Management page as usual. There are Mac and Windows
installers as standard, but not sure if Linux boxes are supported yet?
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| DELL 2024P switch |
Currently the ISIS 1000 does not support Interplay but
then I think people wishing to run Interplay would be looking to the likes of
the ISIS 5k and ISIS 7k if they were investing in Interplay. But as Avid bring
out there cut down virtual Interplays I’m sure we will see this change.
What do we think
The ISIS 1000 looks to be a great box, and I am sure it
will be of interest to a number of people with an expected price of around £12000-£15000
for a complete system I’m sure smaller Indy Post Houses and Education will be very
interested. (would be nice if the LDAP tool went and the system supported AD integration through the Web interface, always a request from the education market) I look forward to seeing this in the field and seeing how it really performs when pushed.
Thanks to Atomise to letting me have a look over the system.
Thanks to Atomise to letting me have a look over the system.
This is a wicked write up of really useful information - short, to the point. Just what I need! We bought our first ISIS a couple of weeks back - the ISIS|1000 w/ Dell N2024 and we've been having some issues.
ReplyDeleteWe used to use EditShare, so we've been running some comparisons. If we import clips to either server the storage used in the same. However, if you Link > Transcode the ISIS|1000 uses up 10MB more space PER FILE (30MB for 1 vid, 2 audio). And if you consolidate to the ISIS - either from EditShare or from one ISIS Workspace to another - it adds 10MB per file again! This means moving across about 50GB of music from EditShare to ISIS used up 200GB!
My first thought was block size, which led me to your very useful blog. You've stated 512KB, which is pretty standard and efficient. There goes the theory. Back to Google I go!