Multichannel ingest with a multichannel DDP
Since the pandemic more and more symphonic orchestras stream concerts. In this case the orchestra had installed eight remotely controlled cameras to stream the orchestra and to zoom in to groups and soloists.
Each camera uses AVC Ultra (100MB/s). They needed a 1PB shared storage system with a capacity for six months of audio and video material for ingest and post production. Ingest should go directly to the hard disks while post production will be done using Project Caching.
The solution: a scalable and high-performance DDP system
A miniDDP24DF with a Project Cache of 128TB configured as two raid5 sets of eight SSDs (eight slots remain free for future expansion) controlling a DDP78EXR with 1PB hard disk capacity configured as nine raid6 sets of eight hard disks was offered.
Identified early: minimizing risks during ingest
Then a good question came up: are there measures which can be taken to lower the risk of having ingest problems? This in addition to the fallback ingest on the internal storage of the ingest application.
Intelligent data distribution for maximum reliability
At first the thought was that raid6 should give enough protection since two hard disks can fail per raid set. It was then realized that a disk in a raid set instead of instantly failing could cause problems, which are not immediately clear.
Take for instance a disk which gets slow on writing. Of course the number of retries can be minimized so the disk kicks out sooner. But an early warning system would be very helpful. So a multichannel DDP was suggested.
In this DDP the nine raid6 sets can be made into nine Data Locations. The ingest application has eight ingest channels so a folder can be created with eight subfolders. To each subfolder a Data Location can be assigned and these subfolders can be connected to the ingest device; one subfolder per ingest channel.
Image of the IO Monitor
The IO Monitor of the DDP’s web interface shows the bandwidth for each Data Location. See the picture. When during IO monitoring a Data Location starts to show unexpected behavior the ninth Data Location can be invoked. For the ingest data to be redirected to the ninth Data Location the channel must be stopped and started again. This is one example of the DDP’s flexibility. Other possibilities not involving a spare Data Location are also possible.
Flexible use – also in postproduction
The postproduction computers for convenience can connect the top folder instead of its subfolders.
This DDP setup offers not only high performance and storage capacity, but also intelligent failover for professional multi-channel ingest.
This architecture also optimally protects long-term streaming and production projects.
