Lightworks Tip Lightworks' New Smart Storage by Patrick Gregston In past issues, the problems of drive failures, and methods to mitigate their dangers, have been presented. In March, Tektronix/Lightworks' London office tested and certified, for use with Lightworks and Heavyworks products, a product which promises to make drive failures a minor event, not a disaster. It also delivers superior performance for installations with multiple systems sharing drives. Smart Storage, as the product is named, implements RAID 5. RAID (redundant array of independent devices) 5 is a method of striping sets of drives and uses hardware compression of data to have true redundancy of files. All picture and sound files are written twice, with each bit of information being on two physically separated drives. Should any one drive in the set fail, the lost data is recovered instantly. Should any one drive in the set fail, the lost data is recovered instantly from the same data stored in "parity" - the computer term for the compressed bits. The practical demonstration of the function is pulling a working drive from the rack while playing an edit. There is no interruption of the playback. New galleries can be opened and worked from while the system rebuilds the lost drive to a hot spare. Rebuild times are relative to the use of the system while the drive is rebuilt. A system left idle will rebuild a 9gb drive in 90 minutes. A system used to edit while rebuilding can take 12 hours to rebuild the same 9gb. Either way, no data is lost; no redigitizing is required. Up to four Lightworks or Heavyworks systems can be sharing as much as half a terabyte of memory at the same time. Unlike Lightworks' Shared Storage, all the workstations function independently. All can be turned on or off without regard to the state of the other workstations. If one unit crashes, it can be rebooted or re-run the software without interrupting the other users. And because each is functioning independently, each runs at the full CPU speed. If you have used a Heavyworks in traditional shared storage, this is an improvement on the functionality that you will really appreciate. Each CPU can also have dedicated drives of either RAID 5 or normal storage. Existing shows can be copied from towers to the Smart Storage using the tower tool. Tektronix has issued a set of guidelines for use of Smart Storage. It is recommended that users run the Shared Storage versions of the software so that the tower tool updates on all shared systems when one is digitizing. The guide also notes the advantages of Smart Storage and points out the different operating parameters for those used to Shared Storage. Smart Storage is available through Electric Picture Solutions, who developed this product. More information about the product is available on their website as is the Tektronix guidelines document. By the way, many calls were received in response to the past issue's article about editing shows with lots of effects on Lightworks. It seems there is a wealth of experience in this area. Thanks for the reports. If you have a tip you'd like to share, please let me know.   Patrick Gregston is a partner in Electric Picture Solutions, as well as, a Guild Boardmember.   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 19, No. 3 - May/June 1998   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 776