Qlogic SANbox 5602 Manual

CASE STUDY
PlasterCITY
Digital Post
“Once again QLogic helped our bottom line with a SAN switch that
speeds up the work of our editors and enables us to provide better
services to our clients.”
– Stephen Beres, Chief Technical Officer, PlasterCITY Digital Post
For companies in the entertainment business, technology often creates competi-
tive advantages. When Hollywood-based PlasterCITY Digital Post (PCDP) tackled
the problems of accommodating higher-resolution imagery while also speeding up
editing turnaround times, it became the first company to perform 4:4:4 high-defini-
tion postproduction entirely on cost-effective Macintosh® desktop computers.
This unprecedented achievement of producing high-definition video in a desktop
environment was accomplished by using a high-performance SAN. Says Stephen
Beres, chief technical officer at PCDP, “We used four stacked 4Gbps QLogic SAN-
box 5602 switches to transfer the enormous files to our desktop workstations. A
single second of high-definition video could be 1.5 gigabytes in size.”
To speed up editing workflow in this environment, Beres decided to double the
bandwidth between the storage devices and the Macintosh workstations. Accord-
ing to Beres,“If we could double the speed of these connections, we could increase
our profitability by performing more postproduction tasks with our existing staff.”
The PCDP SAN gets ready for more speed
The editing workstations were connected to the SAN by two 4Gbps links. Doubling
the connections would deliver the equivalent of 16Gbps of video to each computer.
But this required more ports than the 5602 switches provided, as well as greater
bandwidth than their interswitch links.
“Our QLogic SANbox 5602 switches are great. They took us a long way,” says
Beres. “But today, we need a large, nonblocking switch to take the next step in
performance.”
The 15 editing workstations, along with digital video recording, ingest and color
correction, would use over 100 ports alone. But Beres also wanted to double the
number of connections to the 10 MediaVault storage devices and the three Apple
Xserver servers. An audio room and special color-correction theater were also to
be included in the Fibre Channel connection expansion. All told, Beres and his col-
leagues would quickly require 128 ports operating at 4Gbps.
Challenge
Expand throughput and cut costs of a
storage area network (SAN) used for
desktop editing of uncompressed,
high-definition 4:4:4 format film
Solution
One QLogic® SANbox® 9200 Fibre
Channel switch manages a 32-terabyte
SAN, which includes one Ciprico®
MediaVault™ 4210 Fibre Channel RAID
array and ATTO Fibre Channel host
adapters; Apple® Final Cut Pro® editing
software, and AJA™ KONA™ 2 video
capture cards
Result
128-port 4Gbps SAN switch increases
speed of 4:4:4 high-definition post-
production desktop processes by over
30 percent—improving editor
productivity and shortening
project turnaround times
SANbox 9200 Turbo-Charges
High-Definition Desktop Editing
at PlasterCITY Digital Post

CASE STUDY
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PlasterCITY Digital Post
PCDP relies on QLogic again for more performance
According to Beres, the QLogic SANbox 9200 switch was ideal for their
needs. “With 128 ports and scalability to 256 ports, the switch has all
the capacity we need to accommodate our needs today and support our
growth over the next several years,” he said. “And because the switch is
nonblocking, it allows us to grow without affecting performance.”
QLogic’s support for the Macintosh computing environment convinced
Beres to upgrade with QLogic.“QLogic administrative software is designed
for the Mac,” Beres says. “With other SAN switch vendors, Macintosh soft-
ware is often not as good as the Windows versions.”
The price of the switch also made the SANbox 9200 easy to choose,
according to Beres. “QLogic offered us a 4Gbps switch at a third of the
price of similar offerings from other vendors,” he says. “The SANbox 9200
switch is affordable to acquire, not to mention being inexpensive to expand
and manage.”
PCDP editors immediately see throughput increase by 30 percent
Installation was rapid and nondisruptive. QLogic engineers had the 9000
up and running in a few hours on a Sunday afternoon. “It was a very easy
transition,” Beres says. “And there has been absolutely no downtime.”
Initial results from the SANbox 9200 switch have been impressive. “After a
couple weeks, we have seen performance increase by 30 to 35 percent,”
reports Beres.
PCDP clients have seen the effects of the speedup, too. “We can now sup-
port many more workstations displaying real-time high-definition video,”
Beres says, “so clients who use our facilities to do their own editing and
postproduction work are more productive. The new SAN switch lets us
provide real-time playback in more formats—and this helps with client
creativity. It also has something to do with how we have a full house of custom-
ers every day of the work week.”
As the quality of output has grown, the quantity of work has also increased.
Beres says,“We are now able to do more rendering, color-correcting, and com-
positing without increasing staff or the number of workstations.”
SANbox 9200
The QLogic SANbox 9200 stackable chassis switch, with Designed-to-the-
Core™ features, is a unique, state-of-the-art Fibre Channel switch for 4Gbps
SANs in mission-critical environments that demand 99.999% uptime. The
switch scales from 128 to 256 ports and offers Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and FCIP
card options to completely address the SAN and WAN requirements of an en-
terprise. Unlike director-class switches, the SANbox 9000 is a 4U stackable
switch with port cards and CPU blades, which simply slide into the front of the
chassis. The SANbox 9000 is also equipped with redundant power and cooling
systems to provide high availability for its users.
Key Features
• High density, 16-port, auto-discovery 4Gb/2Gb/1Gb fibre channel I/O blade
• Hot-pluggable, redundant components to meet high-availability standards
• 4-port 10Gb I/O blade for ISLs
• HyperStack™ chassis to modularly increase the port count to 256
• Command line or GUI-based Enterprise Management Suite of tools provided
• Non disruptive code load and activation (NDCLA)
• Power-on Self-Test (POST), online/offline diagnostics, and per-port statistics
• Error detection, fault isolation and remote notification of system events
• Free software allows monitoring and configuring switches and host bust
adapters from one central location
• Interoperability with all major servers and storage and networking devices
provides a quick path for cost-effective growth of existing SAN environ-
ments