Group working on files located on a NAS in Maya, 3DS Max and Mudbox

[twilliams]

Hello everyone and thankyou for your time.

I work in the IT department of an art college, and we seem to be struggling to satisfy the demands of our Animation course. We hired a consultant from the animation idustry to suggest changes to our course work flow, but I was hoping to clarify a few things here.

Our lectures don't seem to see an issue with running files directly from our little consumer NAS, this rings warning bells for me as we're talking about classes of 25, editing files across the network and through the single gigabit conection on the NAS? Am I over estimating the data flow in this setup? The NAS was originally set up with the purpose of storing course files which is not viable locally, but it wasn't implimented with the intention that files would be copied to a local workstation, edited, and then re saved to the NAS.

We're currently looking at upgrading the workstations for this suite, and the new machines are likely to be quite high end. My query is whether it would be better to put money into the network speed rather than the computers? How much would we gain by buying a NAS with 10gbe and connected to a 10gbe switch, with 1gbe to desk (we currently have 100MB to desk)? Are we looking at a situation with substantial wasted headroom with the 10GBe NAS connection? Would 1GBe be enough?

Cheers,
Tom

[twilliams]

Bump!

[pendean]

Not much ooint in bumping up your question: you left it open-ended and all 33 users looking at it so far decided to pass on it.

You, yourself, need to measure the amount of traffic being created by your users to the NAS to better understand what you need to service your users: you honestly provide no details so no one here can comment beyond throwing guesses at you.

Discover and udentify your users' actuak usage then come back with that info if you really still need an answer.

[twilliams]

Hello,
Thanks for the reply.
The thing is, I have been lead to believe this is a very standard setup in the industry, (users working on files located on a NAS <without copying them locally first>) but it doesn't sit right with me. Hence me asking here, if others have a similar setup? It doesn't seem that unreasonable really to ask about users experiances; isn't that what a forum is for?

Measuring the usage isn't really possible, currently the students have disapeared for the summer which makes it impossible for me to measure while the class is in sesson, the current computers are somewhat old and may be the cause of issue, and tbh I don't get paid to do it, it would be alocating too much of my time to a single cohort.

What I was hoping for as an aswer was more along the lines of "We use a similar setup to yours although we have 15 worksatations and they connect via a single gigabit ethernet to a NAS. We edit files directly on the NAS and do not take a local copy first and this works fine!" or "We take local copies of files before editing them!" etc etc

Rather than:

"Why bother posting, and wasting our time, work it out yourself rather than asking our oppinions, people haven't answered you because they don't care!" <paraphrased to demonstrate the way it has come across>

Which I can't say is very welcoming 🙂

[pendean]

Peer support is finicky: if all you want to do is sit tight and wait for someone to come along and through guesses and inapplicable scenarios at you, you can do so by all means.

if you want actual help from actual users that manage office environments with light to heavfy traffic, sharing more information about your usage patterns, loads and more would be very helpful in getting you real answers.

More you know about your own usage the more you can find a solution that works for you without throwing good money at pipeline increases you do not need.

Have you done any sort of feedback from your students, or their teachers, during the school year to see if tehre were any existing issues or complaints?
How do you encourage your students to work: do they edit directly on the NAS or download files locally to do so? Do they just use the NAS for file storage? Are the PCs individually set up and rely on no shared resources on the NAS?

We can't do your hoemwork for you (pun intended): do the work, show your results, share your current usage information.

Peer support: you share, we share, we all learn from each other. give to receive, or go pay a consultant to just give you the moon 🙂

[twilliams]

Fair enough, I can certainly give more details on our situation as you've requested:

A year or two ago, one of our animation tutors came to us asking for a location to store large files for collective use within the group. At the time, all of our enterprise storage was tied up in emails and in-house MIS and Moodle services. So I suggested purchasing a small, consumer NAS for storage, which would offer us a cheap solution which they could self manage.

Our animation course has been blighted with issues, and it's been difficult to isolate which problems are related to our equipment and which are due to their environment, attitude, staff, students, managers. It is noticeable though that our animation course complains about their equipment a lot more than our other cohorts do.

Although my intention of a NAS was for storage alone, this doesn't seem to have been correctly conveyed to the staff who have only recently mentioned that they work on files directly off the NAS.

In terms of reliance on the NAS:

I install all of their software flat, no configuration at all, we utilise a piece of software called "Deepfreeze" which effectively reimages the workstations on every reboot, so any changes made to the applications are wiped every day. They have a simple shortcut placed on their desktops to an SMB share on their NAS box. So there is no "reliance" for either the NAS or the workstation. I have also setup a render farm which pulls and deposits directly from and to the NAS using Smedge as a manager.

The computers (which are being replaced early due to so many complaints) are:
Dell Vostro 430
Core i7 870 (2.93GHz)
4GB DDR3
nVidia GTS240 (1GB GDDR5)
23" Dell Widescreen monitor (1920x1080)
The NAS is a Thecus N5200 PRO with two 2TB disks mirrored in a raid 1. Only one of the Ethernet ports is in use (can't really tell you why)
The workstations and NAS are connected to various switches back in the cab, but it is fair to say that the they will all hit a base 100 at some point in the journey, and that will be the throttling factor.

Our new kit will be an upgrade, but we tend to steer clear of Xeon/Quadro/FirePRO and buy the consumer equivalent as a "bang for buck" measure due to our budgets. We'll be spending between £1500 and £2000 per unit and there will be 20 student use workstations, 1 instructor workstation, 1 staff workstation, 1 edit workstation.

I'm hoping for a system close to:
Core i7 4770k (3.5GHz)
32GB DDR3 2400MHz
2X nVidia Geforce GTX6600 (2GB) SLi
6Gb/s SSD (450MB/R, 450MB/W)
2X 24" monitors

It's likely we'll have to compromise on some of this, but hopefully not any of the performance related bits.

"Have you done any sort of feedback from your students, or their teachers, during the school year to see if tehre were any existing issues or complaints?"

- There have been complaints, many, most of which being intermittent crashes, some of which is likely to be related to the environment (they were located for a year in a small room with no air con or good air flow, glass frontage and flat tin roof. Which heated up like an oven), some were related to RAM being stolen from the systems.

"How do you encourage your students to work: do they edit directly on the NAS or download files locally to do so? Do they just use the NAS for file storage?"

I don't entirely know, the head of the course; who does most of the teaching, doesn't know an awful lot about tech, I've tried to describe to him the potential differences between editing a file on a network location and taking a local copy. I believe he wants to edit directly from the NAS.

"Are the PCs individually set up and rely on no shared resources on the NAS?"

I don't think I entirely understand the question, are you talking about thin client? I have set the workstations up independently from the NAS. Users simply browse to a shared folder (or use a pre created shortcut)

Apologies for the wall of text, I have tried to edit as best I can, but there's a lot of history to this situation which I was trying to avoid getting into.

Oh and we currently use the latest and greatest versions of all the application in use.

Thanks,
Tom

[sam_m]

to be honest, how helpful would a "We edit files directly on the NAS and do not take a local copy first and this works fine!" comment be anyway?

everyone's files are of different complexity, file-size, etc.  not to mention different network configuration, different NAS setups etc.  the list goes on and on...  the only way to know if it's suitable for you and your system is to sadly try it...

but... my honest thinking...

we have 5 Inventor users here and IT were suggesting a NAS for our file store and I managed to stop it.  Frankly a NAS isn't intended for multiple users accessing and saving data in an environment where time=money and we all strive for better performance.  Not to mention the potential lack of backup systems, Vault, etc. that's possible on a proper server - which we decided is what's needed (for us, in a workplace).

now, whether a NAS might be do-able in a teaching environment, dunno, possibly...  I'm only guessing, but could imagine the dataset being a lot smaller and simpler than a workplace with large assemblies, hell, you tell me?!?  but you're talking about 25 users all trying to work through the same exercises and potentially all trying to load and save at roughly the same times (start and end of class) - that's REALLY not what a NAS is intended for and could imagine it grinding to a snails pace with so many parallel hard-disc requests...  At the end of the day, a NAS is a file store, not a server, which is sounds like you really should be looking at.

[sam_m]

in addition...

A penny has just dropped... if you're talking about animation courses then I can only guess there's lots of textures and if so can the data-sets be quite large?  If so, then it's even more reason the "live work" should be either local or on a system intended for multiple simultaneous connections (server) and not a NAS.

Hey, a NAS should work, in theory, but could well grind to such a slow speed it could cause stability issues?!?  Potentially more and more likely as people get so pissed with it taking so long then reset their pc mid access and it starting to corrupt data...

[twilliams]

Thank you,
Very helpful, and yes, probably large files going back and forth.
Currently a "we do this and it's fine" "we do that and it's better" is exactly the kind of information I'm looking for.

I understand there's no magic answer that will just fix it, pointers are great 🙂

Sever storage might be an option for us shortly as a lot of our internal services are being farmed out "to the cloud" 

Cheers for the help,
Tom