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Education
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Pepperdine decides to build do-it-yourself server system
May 21, 2007
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by Michael Murrie
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Imagine you're a student working on the big final project that's the key to your class grade and success. It's due tomorrow, and you want to put the final touches on it tonight. You open the project and find the dreaded words "Media Offline." The clips are lost, or perhaps somebody found the drive full and erased them.
Consider a similar scenario. You wait too long to finish your project. You enter the edit lab to find two other students with similar deadlines in line to work on their two projects on the same computer, even though two nearby computers are empty.
Fortunately, these days mass storage is cheap, and there are choices to deal with these problems. You could save a lot of money by requiring students to keep their projects on their own portable hard drives, but that limits sharing, control, and accessibility. Plus, you can't have group projects or store common tutorial materials that way, either.
Instead, the Pepperdine University student television facility wanted a video server. Avid and EditShare had interesting systems, but chief engineer Bill Dawson thought they operated too much like "islands." He wanted a system that integrated with the existing television Ethernet network and the larger university network. He also wanted more functions and flexibility for the prices quoted.
After consulting with other staff and faculty, researching and reading, running some tests with the existing network, and asking a lot of questions at NAB, Dawson started to build an edit server. It would enable access to media files and project files from any edit station, increase and flexibly configure storage capacity, make available common source material (including limited archive material) to multiple students, enhance transfer via network to other parts of the television facility (especially to a playback server), and make edit projects accessible to staff and faculty. Of course, the system also had to be reliable, scalable, affordable, and simple to use.
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| Students Foster Driver (left) and Laura Colvin work in Pepperdine's edit lab using the school's "homemade" video server. |
Built For Speed
Located near Los Angeles, Pepperdine includes a private, liberal arts college at the main Malibu campus. About 140 undergraduate television production and broadcast news majors use the television facility, which includes a studio, newsroom/video lab, and five high-end edit suites. Students shoot using 3-CCD DV camcorders. The lab has 10 Windows PCs with Avid Xpress Pro (5.6.2) editing software, while the high-end suites have Mac G5 platforms with Final Cut Pro and Avid.
The system installed last fall includes two major components, a 15 TB server and a modular switch. The server's operating software is Windows 2003, 64-bit. Hardware consists of 24 drives, each with a capacity of 750 GB for a total raw capacity of 18 TB, of which 15 TB is usable for data storage.
Genstor built the specified server at a cost of less than $22,000 last summer. All disks are configured to be seen as one on the television facility's network. Each PCIe RAID 6 card serves an array of 12 drives.
The new HP ProCurve 5400zl networking switch has 1 Gbps Ethernet from server to edit clients and 10 Gbps between switch and server with a 10 Gbps spare. The new system replaced the edit client 10/100 Ethernet cards with 1 Gbps cards. Although not essential, Dawson upgraded existing Category 5e cable to Cat 6.
Dawson chose login as work group server rather than domain server to avoid the university's domain controller. A student on one of the lab PCs clicks on an Avid icon on the desktop; that launches a Visual Basic login script that verifies the user for the edit server, maps the student's folder on the edit server drive to the client PC he is using, and opens Avid edit software.
A VB administration script creates user folders and project and media folders. Within these, Avid creates folders for individual projects. The staff manually creates user IDs and sets access privileges and expirations, but hopes to create scripts to automate these processes, too.
Each production and broadcast news student is allocated 100 GB of storage for his entire career at Pepperdine, and can manage the use of his own space. The staff can change the size of the allocated space.
Special folders are available to all users or selected groups of users. They include editing tutorial materials, archived video from newscasts, and stock video. Special folders can also be created for group projects or for edited items for specific shows. The special folders allow multiple users to work on a project; however, multiple users cannot work on the same project from more than one workstation at the same time.
Students can access their projects and media files from any edit station. The system has the potential to accommodate student laptops in the lab and access the server via a 1 Gbps connection. Students eventually may access the edit server from other computers on campus, but this remains to be tested. The system can also accommodate more server drives and switch ports.
The common availability of tutorial material improves instructional capabilities with less staff time and trouble. Plus, students especially appreciate the availability of archived material to expedite assembly of their demo reels; it also helps them easily find archive video to improve their newscasts. "It makes me more productive," said Stefan Holt, a broadcast news major.
The 'Guessing Curve'
Generally, the new server has been reliable. "I haven't had any complaints about it from the people using it," said Wade Brown, facility director. "I do think its going to be a lot less work in the long run." Brown created a desktop tutorial to help students learn the new system.
Dawson said the 10 GB server card has dropped offline twice, but reboots restored it. He believes RAID 6 provides more data protection than needed; he now prefers RAID 5 with a hot spare to improve write speed and still have sufficient data backup. Linux would probably be a better operating system, Dawson added, but he was more familiar with Windows.
Excluding labor, the overall cost was about $34,000. Dawson said a smaller, less redundant system could easily be constructed for much less.
The best vendor quote in April 2006 in this price range was for a 5 TB system without the switch. Of course, building the system cost Dawson months of time researching the technology and improving his scripting skills. The actual assembly and construction, however, took only about two weeks.
"Its more of a guessing curve," Dawson said about developing the system. "You take your current knowledge and project that and try it."
Michael Murrie serves Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, as a professor and director of student journalism. Contact him at mmurrie@pepperdine.edu.
MORE INFO
Apple apple.com
Avid Technology avid.com
Genstor Systems genstor.com
Hewlett-Packard hp.com
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