The Brass over at SportsHD have decided to upgrade the whole storage infastructure amid MANY projects. The reasoning - adding a new edit bay (and additionally, a second editor) for the pre-NATPE push, as well as to finish our 6×30 deliverables to INHD2 by late February.

Enter XSAN.

Basically, our setup right now is (1) Dual 2.7 G5 to (2) 400GB drive XRAIDs via fiber channel. We will be adding (1) new AQuad 2.5 G5 and thus a large purchase order for a G5 server, XSAN, and ethernet switch was fufilled.

At RAID 0, our two drives are now housing about 3.6TB of 8.6 (n’change) of all available storage which represents about 40 hours of DVCPRO HD ingest and another 40 (or so) hours of HDV ingest, plus various graphics, DVD bullshit, and other nonsense. The problem: In order to XSANify our current setup, we must properly STRIPE AND INITIALLIZE BOTH RAIDS. Eeesh!

Calls to other Denver post-houses came up empty while looking for an XRAID to “borrow”. Alas - this weekend will be one of ’round-the-clock ingest, as our schedule deems we must have (2) edit bays up and running by Monday 1/9.

I will be chronicling the install and setup here. This shall be quite interesting….