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jasonrudolph
13-10-2004, 03:04 AM
So, my company is about to purchase a catalyst server, and it seems as High End will no longer be selling servers. They are only going to be selling the software. So, if you needed to build your own server, what would you put into it???

Jason Rudolph

Spam Butterfly
13-10-2004, 02:34 PM
Here's what I would put in it:
2Ghz Dual Processor G5
ATI Radeon 9800
Atto Express PCI UL4S SCSI card
Maxtor Atlas 10K Ultra 320 146Gb drive or Seagate Cheetah 10K Ultra 320 146Gb drive
SCSI cable and terminator.

Decklink Extreme - note that long runs of SDI need reclocking with this card.
Aurora Pipe or Aurora Pipe SDI

Powered USB hub.

Keyspan 4 Port High Speed serial interface.

emagic Unitor 8 MkII

Artistic Licence ArtNet box.

A couple of Kramer XGA DA's.

Depending on what environment that you use your Catalyst, you might want to add some decent scan converters too.

Hugh
Catalyst Test bloke.

samsc
14-10-2004, 08:02 AM
The most important thing - and minimal thing to do - to a newly purchased G5 - is to add a second disc drive.

The software does not work well at all if you run content from the same drive as the one containing the system.

Internally - minimally - you can add a 10,000 rpm sata raptor drive
Or add a scsi card and drive.

Externally you should be looking to add a hard disc system.
External SCSI systems, are much safer at the moment.
SCSI is a well proven technology.

I think highend has put together some documentation - which is not available yet.

samsc
14-10-2004, 07:58 PM
So, my company is about to purchase a catalyst server, and it seems as High End will no longer be selling servers. They are only going to be selling the software. So, if you needed to build your own server, what would you put into it???

Jason Rudolph

Jason.

You are pretty together.
You know your stuff.

What would you do?

Richard

jasonrudolph
15-10-2004, 02:56 PM
Well, I think I have it all figured out. But I have one question. Since I will be purchasing a enw machine, it will most likely have 10.3.5 installed on it. Where can I get myslef a copy of 10.3.3 to install on it?

samsc
15-10-2004, 03:13 PM
Well, I think I have it all figured out. But I have one question. Since I will be purchasing a enw machine, it will most likely have 10.3.5 installed on it. Where can I get myslef a copy of 10.3.3 to install on it?

The next version. which will hopefully be out very very soon. will work with 10.3.5.

I think you might have problems if you backwards install onto a new machine....

What kindof configuration are you going to be speccing?

R

jasonrudolph
15-10-2004, 04:02 PM
Dual 2ghz g5 (don't have the option to wait for the 2.5)
2g ram (will also do some video work on the machine)
Radeon 9800xt

ATTO UL4D SCSI Controller

Two External 147 GB Seagate 10K RPM SCSI drives in a RAID array (with the budget I had, this fit in)

ArtNet Etherlynx

8 port gigabit ethernet switch

Furman 1U rackmount UPS, and a 1U power conditioner

Two extron UXGA DAs

samsc
15-10-2004, 04:23 PM
Two External 147 GB Seagate 10K RPM SCSI drives in a RAID array (with the budget I had, this fit in)


Which scsi case are you getting?

jasonrudolph
15-10-2004, 07:07 PM
well, right now, I am just looking at the ones OWC has, but do you have any suggestions?

Also, do you have any idea as to when the 10.3.5-compatible version will be out?

samsc
15-10-2004, 11:14 PM
hugh just got one.
it looks like a mini g5 tower. dont know which one it is.
he had 5 scsi drives inside it.

i got mine from granite digital. they do pro-quality scsi cabling.
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg03_cases.htm

glyph, and medea also do rack mount units.

http://www.medea.com/

glyph do nice rack mount cases. road tested for audio application.
http://www.glyphtech.com/site/home_intro.html

im sure other people have suggestions.

----
10.3.5
hugh and i are working through the last bugs right now.
we are almost there.

samsc
10-11-2004, 03:10 PM
Highend thinks it has the answer.

But they have only answered the question from their own point of view.

There are many variations on this theme

http://www.highend.com/support/digital_lighting/catalystsupportguide/

litemover
29-11-2004, 12:04 AM
hugh just got one.
it looks like a mini g5 tower. dont know which one it is.
he had 5 scsi drives inside it.

i got mine from granite digital. they do pro-quality scsi cabling.
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg03_cases.htm

glyph, and medea also do rack mount units.

http://www.medea.com/

glyph do nice rack mount cases. road tested for audio application.
http://www.glyphtech.com/site/home_intro.html

im sure other people have suggestions.

----
10.3.5
hugh and i are working through the last bugs right now.
we are almost there.

The Mini G5 tower looking racks sound like the Huge systems MediaVault u320R available from hugesystems.com. They are awesome and the single channel version will get you well over 200 mb/s reads. They are reasonable, I got a quote of $2800USD. The downside to them is that in order to get the max performance, you must put them in turbo mode which partitions the drives so only the prime areas of each ATA drive is used. This lowers your capacity.

Still a great product.

Not sure if that is what Hugh bought.

Christian Choi

Spam Butterfly
29-11-2004, 11:47 AM
http://www.hugesystems.com/Products/index.cfm?P=MVault-U320-R

I bought one of these. Kick arse video performance and good value for money. On a good day, I can get 8 (yes 8) streams of DV PAL wiggling around out of it. I can get 4 streams of SD uncompressed video...

Hugh

samsc
29-11-2004, 03:03 PM
i heard a rumour that the xraid works quite well- though i have never tested one.

they are very expensive but they have huge caches - 512MB/channel, and i think they must do some command priority processing as well.


http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

litemover
25-03-2007, 02:07 PM
I would build a simple sompact server using:

1. Macbook Pro 17" ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 with 256MB of GDDR3 SDRAM dual link(current highest grade model with latest Radeon Video Card)
2. FirmTek SeriTek/2SM2-E dual SATA output card (up to 300mbs transfer)
3. FirmTek SeriTek/2EN2 Dual SATAe enclosure with 2 148gb Raptors
4. Matrox Triple head to go digital.
5. AJA I/O for SDI/composite/component input
6. Zandar DX 16 for multiple viewing
7. 1 30" Dell 3007 Flat Panel Dual link LCD.
8. Enttec Datagate 8 port UDP to DMX output.
9. Artnet 2 port input box.
10. Rolling carry on case.
11. Wireless Apple bluetooth Keyboard and mighty mouse

Larger system
.Macpro dual 3ghz
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB GDDR3 SDRAM (2 x dual-link DVI)
.5 Raptor 147gb Drives (Removing the second optical drive and using it for a raptor boot drive) Stripe 4 of the raptors in Zero mode.
.Firmtek Seritek Sata card to drive the boot drive.
.Matrox Triple head to go digital.
.Zandar DX 16
.30" Dell 3007 Flat Panel
.Decklink HD STUDIO PCIe HD/SD switching input card with sony deck control
.Geffen DVI-D Switchers
.PCI-e USB Card with internal USB port for dongle.
.4gb Ram
.Kensington Expert laser trackball.
.ADC to DVI converter
.Imagepro HD/SD
.PCI-E 8 port serial card.
.Cisco 24 port GB Ethernet Switch
.Artnet in.
.2 Datagate 8 port
All cables and adaptors.
Compact Rackmount case.
Multi System I might include an Xserve, Xserveraid and Xsan with fibre distro system, fibre channel cards for each system etc...

Christian Choi