swami62
(swami62)
1
I am putting together a shared storage server for 25 people to edit video from. I had an idea to combine iSCSI and SMB to get the best of both protocols in the following way:
Video footage is stored on a 100TB iSCSI target (a bunch of RAIDed NVMe drives formatted with exFAT). Project folders are stored on a 2TB SMB network share. Video footage is restored from our tape archive, and then the files are not changed. The files are only referenced in the project files. So this is effectively read-only data. Hence having 25 people connecting to a single iSCSI target need not be a problem. From the Wireshark analysis I have done, iSCSI has significantly lower latency than SMB. This would result in a smoother experience for editors playing and scrubbing through videos.
Project files are the only files that get modified, so we would keep them on an SMB share, so that possible write contentions are handled. Note that editors are anyway not supposed to work on the same project at the same time, and on our current (legacy) SAN, even though the BWFS file system may handle all the file-locking at the FS level, the project still gets corrupted, because the application doesn’t support multiuser editing.
I have not seen this approach discussed anywhere. Could someone point out any potential problems with this that I might be missing.
4 Spice ups