Please share experience with managed cluster

Folks,
I am curious to hear about your experience with compressor's managed cluster.
Here is my experience with a setup that consists of
a) 8 quadcore mac mini, with Mountain Lion and Compressor 4.06
b) NFS storage connected with 1gb link to each mac mini
c) Compressor preference set to never copy to/from cluster storage
Experiment 1: One managed cluster with 4 compressor service instances on eight mac mini. So a total of 32 compressor instances.
The instances are set to send an email when they go down.
Source: 4K Image sequence with 1850 images
Target: Apple ProRes 422 (default)
Output: NFS storage
Observations:
1) The target codec determines the number of segments the job gets broken down into. For example the HD 1080p setting will break the job into atmost 6 segments (regardless of 32 instances that I have available). In case of ProRes 422 the number of segment were 64 ie 2x more than the number of instances available.
2) The compressors service instances are extremely temperamental and flimsy. I got over 100 error notification for this experimental job, about a dozen instances of compressor were in bad state/dead and the job failed with many errors as follows.
The error seems to indicate an issue with file naming, but I am unsure what it points towards
1/26/13 7:03:54.815 PM compressord[12399]: *** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[NSPlaceholderString initWithFormat:locale:arguments:]: nil argument'
*** Call stack at first throw:
          0   CoreFoundation                      0x982c712b __raiseError + 219
          1   libobjc.A.dylib                     0x92eea52e objc_exception_throw + 230
          2   CoreFoundation                      0x98226bbb +[NSException raise:format:] + 139
          3   Foundation                          0x93885d02 -[NSPlaceholderString initWithFormat:locale:arguments:] + 99
          4   Foundation                          0x93886e8c +[NSString stringWithFormat:] + 88
          5   AECore                              0x000805da -[ImageSequenceMedia fileURLForFrame:] + 399
          6   AECore                              0x00082908 -[ImageSequenceMedia readImageInfo] + 118
          7   AECore                              0x00080968 -[ImageSequenceMedia isNativePixelFormat:] + 34
          8   StompTypes                          0x0032b791 _ZNK27CExtendedImageSequenceMedia19isNativePixelFormatEi + 47
          9   StompTypes                          0x003202d1 _ZN5stomp13IMediaDecoder20IsDecodablePixelTypeEiRK7CURLRefRKNS_18CFilterSetting sRefE + 71
          10 Transcoding                         0x004c4ac4 _ZN5stomp17CQTSpitTranscoder16optimalPixelTypeERKNS_18CFilterSettingsRefE + 856
          11 Transcoding                         0x004c5ca3 _ZN5stomp22CQTSpitMovieTranscoder22configureSpitComponentEm + 761
          12 Transcoding                         0x004c38eb _ZN5stomp17CQTSpitTranscoder3runEv + 327
          13 Transcoding                         0x004a8498 _ZN5stomp16CStompTranscoder15_processRequestERKN5swamp18IServiceRequestRefE + 3740
          14 ServiceControl                      0x00cbde00 _ZN5swamp24CServiceControllerThread7runOnceEv + 2068
          15 AECore                              0x00023364 _ZN6aecore7CThread9runThreadEv + 36
          16 AECore                              0x00020ffc _Z10threadProcPv + 17
          17 libsystem_c.dylib                   0x95b5d557 _pthread_start + 344
          18 libsystem_c.dylib                   0x95b47cee thread_start + 34
******************************************************************************** ******************************************************************************** ************ Experiment 2: Experiment 2: One managed cluster with 2 compressor service instances on seven mac mini. The master controller is not running any compressor instances its just taking care of house keeping. So a total of 14 compressor instances.
Source: 4K Image sequence with 1850 images
Target: Apple ProRes 422 (default)
Output: NFS storage
Observations: job failed, two dead compressor instances and about 20 error notifications of instance down
Conclusions:
Overall, the jobs which transcode movies from one format to another have a good chance of success. However the same is not true for Image sequences.
The distributed compressor instances are extremely flaky and their revival scheme of four times(as per documentation) is not enough.
I am eager to know your experience with distributed encoding using compressor.
a) What are your thoughts on stability of distributed encoding using compressor for a large number of jobs
b) Is there an automatic way to revive dead compressor instances?
c) What other tools are out there which perform better? I am looking for a way to setup unmanned operation.
Cheers
-A

Have been playing around with Report Designer and I found it useful for basic formatting but not for the one's you had mentioned in your post.
SAPs suggests you do all the data manipulation in the Query Designer or Infocube and use Report Designer for just formatting the data. In the past we had issues where we could not certain calculation in query designer and have used Crystal Reports along with BI data for similar kind of things which you had mentioned in your post (using sub reports and report level data manipulation). Report Designer unfortunately does not provide any of these functionalities.
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Thanks.

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Even the computer is very well designed, as a high end user I found there are still a couple places that Lenovo can improve.
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I am satisfied with it. I feel I have made a great purchase. Would be nice it I can install an additional SSD in there. Would nice if they can put a high end video card in there. Good for home offices, and home entertainments. Not recommended for hardcore gamer.
Price: 4.5 / 5
Performance: 4.5 / 5
Exterior Design: 5 / 5
Interior Design: 3.5 / 5
Customer Service: 4.5 / 5
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Other thoughts:
When I was doing my research on All-In-One, here are the reasons that why I have chosen Lenovo:
1.Sony has a well designed for their product, but the price is high. Most importantly, the video card they have is Nvidia Geforce 540M GT, and it only supports 8GB of ram, not 16 GB.
2. Toshiba has terrible customer services for technical support. I had a very bad experience with them. I believe they have out sourced it to India base companies. When the computer is out of warranty after 1 year, they charge a $35(or $30)dollars troubleshooting fee. I think this is ridiculous to charge the consumer to talk over the phone to find what is the problem with their product.
3. Dell has better customer service than Toshiba; They do not charge for talking and providing the technical support after warranty, but when it comes with parts replacement, that is something we have to pay which is understandable. However, one thing I really don’t like Dell computers is that they install a LOT of junks onto your machine when you buy it. It’s fully loaded with all these third party softwares who pays Dell for more users. It not only slows down the system, but also generate a lot of garbage uses a lot of disk space. I will reconsider to buy Dell if they give me a clean & Junk-free windows.
4. iMac is also a good choice because it’s well designed too. but I did not chose it because it has very limited expansion ports and they charge insanely more for hard-wares upgrade. They have extreme control over their product from customer modification. They don’t even allow the consumer to replace the hard drive themselves.
5. HP also has wonderful All-In-Ones, but their hardware specs seems weak. Never dealt with HP customer service before, so I will not say anything about their customer services. Hopefully it’s better than Toshiba. = )
also been posted on my personal blog

Thank you for replying.
Where I can buy a seperate RapidDrive?
I couldn't find it on the marcket, or on shop.lenovo.com / http://www.lenovospareparts.com/
With the mSata power splitter, there is a problem.
The data portion and the power portion shares the same connector I belive. I have thought of it but don't know how to make it possible. any suggestions?
the only thing I can find is this : http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0317944
but I still need to convert the power connector because it's 4 pin molex;. I guess it should work if I use another 6" Molex to SATA Power Cable Adapter.
Also, I couldn't find which is the SATA 3.0 and Which is the SATA 6.0 connector. SSD will have a huge difference in performace with a SATA 6.0 connector. This is confusing because on the B520 Spec sheet it stated both. I was looking for it's manual to identify, but no one can provides it. Last time when I called, they forwarded my call to Intel. LOL! I was like, **bleep**? It's a board you used and you dont have a manual for it?
Anyways,
Thanks again!

Please share experience with managed cluster

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