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Technology Stocks : The New QLogic (ANCR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Dawson who wrote (26671)	4/30/2000 6:06:00 PM
From: princesedi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 29386

(COMTEX) B: SAN Installation Solves Networking Woes -- Forefront Tack B: SAN Installation Solves Networking Woes -- Forefront Tackles Video Apr. 29, 2000 (Computer Reseller News - CMP via COMTEX) -- Irvine, Calif. - Companies around the world turn to Caterpillar Inc. when they need to push mounds of dirt and rocks from here to there. Yet when Caterpillar needed to push mounds of ones and zeros across its video production system, it turned for help to the video storage integration experts at Forefront Graphics Corp., Toronto. Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar, best known for its ubiquitous yellow earth movers and bulldozers, is also home to the Caterpillar Television Center, a state-of-the-art video production and broadcast facility. The center produces training and corporate communication and news videos and features a satellite uplink center to broadcast many of those videos to corporate offices worldwide. It employs two full-time video editors, as well as producers who go around the world for on-location shooting. Those videos are produced and edited on three dedicated Media 100 non-linear editing systems, which are essentially Macintosh computers packed with high-end video hardware and software. Yet until last summer, the company was relying on a "sneaker net"-the editors would manually run hard drives from machine to machine and last year decided it was time to upgrade to a storage area network (SAN). The center's Media 100s were not networked, said George Litz, chief engineer at the center. As a result, complicated video effect files were done on one machine and copied to removable hard drives. The drives then were carried to a second machine for rendering and then carried back to the original machine to see if it was successful. To increase the efficiency of the video-editing process and to reduce the risks involved with handling hard drives, Litz called in Forefront after a recommendation from the Media 100 vendor, Electronic Communications Systems. Networking the Media 100s presented the integrator with several interoperability issues, said Dan McBride, Fibre Channel specialist at Forefront. "All editing systems, because of all the hardware involved, are very complex," he said. "A lot of fine tuning and synchronization is needed. When you go to another level by adding a SAN, you are really stretching their limits." On the software side, there was no choice. The Media 100 systems used by Caterpillar required the integrator use Tivoli Systems Inc.'s Suite Fusion for the SAN operating system. McBride said he wanted to use Fibre Channel switches from Ancor Communications Inc. to network the Media 100s together because he likes the vendor's approach to networking, especially its use of IP in its switches. "But when we started, the Media 100s had Fibre Channel cards that didn't work with the Ancor switches," he said. "So we had to change to ATTO [Technology Inc.] cards. . . . We choose the ATTO cards because they seem to work best with Macs and offer the best plug-and-play compatibility." Once the cards and the switches were connected, all sorts of minor problems occurred, such as funny screen colors. That was when the integrator discovered that the copper cables Caterpillar was using for their point-to-point connections were not suitable for the new networked storage fabric. So they tore out the copper cables and replaced them with fiberglass. After the interoperability issues were resolved, the results were fantastic, said McBride. "The Media 100 people told us that when we put ATTO and Ancor and the glass cable together, it was the most stable system they had ever seen." The SAN has made a remarkable difference in the center's efficiency, said List. "Now, to do an effect, we just send the file to the digitizing station over the network, do the effect and then transfer the file back to the workstation. When it's finished, the file gets backed up to AIT tape. . . . I don't think there's been a hard drive pulled since Forefront finished." List has recommended Forefront to several other similar operations. "We have had a lot of phone calls from a lot of people who put in similar systems, and we always send them to Forefront," he said. "They're a very knowledgeable group." Doing a video SAN is different from transactional processing, said McBride. "In the video industry, you can't miss a bit, or it will cause synchronization problems with other video equipment," he said. "Our labs are constantly humming to test the latest and greatest so we can say if it works or not," he said. crn.com