A client who has a video editing studio came to us with a problem. Their need for content had risen dramatically due to Social Networking sites such as YouTube , Facebook and MySpace. This means they were making even more content to keep up with demand, however with this generation they where finding problems with their existing setup. They were using a Mac for the editing , creation and then backup of material. The Mac had only come with 1Terabyte of Storage so they had to purchase external usb drives to archive data off until they archived it onto tape. When data needed to be archived off onto tape this added strain to the Mac and the machine couldn’t be used for editing. The Mac Software also did not utilise backup appending to media which means tape archiving was getting difficult to manage.
To resolve this issue we installed a Fully Redundant Drobo Elite with a 7 Terabyte Array ( 1 Terabyte for Redundancy) . This is dynamically growable to 13 Terabytes when the Client runs out of space. This Drobo Elite is connected to the Mac and another Windows 2008 Server machine with Backup Exec using an NTFS Share via a 1 Gigabyte iSCSI network. So far the results have proved amazing. Uncompressed High Definition Video can be streamed directly from the Drobo to the Mac for Editing, and the Windows Machine can backup the contents to Tape without reducing the Mac’s performance for Video Editing.
