Xserve and Video Editing

Question

New to the world of mac. Last year and READ TONS and setup a mac server with 20 imac workstations. All or bound to the server and is running open directory. The server has 2 physical drives, 1 that the OS and homes directory is on the other is a shared drived for data storage of the users. Here is my issue. I hope someone can shed some light on HOW I REALLY SHOULD BE DOING THIS.
The teacher wants to load videos to the share drive weekly, roughly 20 dv tapes that contain anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes of video. She wants the students, roughly 30 students, to download the video from the share drive to their desktop (which really resides on the server since they are open directory accounts with mapped homes) and edit the video and then send it back up to the SHARE DRIVE. Well.... for one, I see the HOMES directory is not a good options since there are really no local profiles on the machine. It also seems like if I do away with the HOMES directory and just have the students accounts locally on the imac then I may fill up the drive on the imacs from each student down loading the videos to work on them. Plus they plan to load new video to the share very week. My 2 TB share drive is not going to handle this for too long. They say they need to keep the videos for end of year footage that they need to create and they are constantly erasing the DV tapes to reuse due to cost.
SO....... Who is doing this sort of thing out there and what is a good solution without spending a ton of money for a SAN? Any input is most appreciate.
Thanks
NEWBIE MAC SERVER ADMIN

Answer 1

Hi
Welcome to the Forum!
+"Who is doing this sort of thing out there?"+
I've done roughly 10-15 such deployments since the beginning of the year. All in Education and each different. Some AD; some AD-OD; some OD.
Most suffering from similar problems to yours.
(1) Inadequate Network Infrastructure and Bandwidth
(2) No prior consultation between IT and Teaching Staff
(3) Teaching Staff's desires and expectations exceeding their Skills
(4) No funding for appropriate Training
If you had known beforehand exactly what the Teaching staff were planning to do you could have specified a server/storage solution that would at least have had a fighting chance? I've re-read your post a number of times and . . . you're going to have to spend money. You've quickly realized a single 2TB drive is just not going to cut it. Besides you don't really have 2TB. You don't fill a hard drive to its maximum without expecting performance problems.
I see no mention of redundancy or even backup?
However there are a number of strategies you could consider using? Apart from a locked down local admin account you could create a single Generic Student Account and attach a large external FireWire drive. I know some schools successfully using this method. The Generic Student Account can be managed using Parental Controls locally. You could even use WorkGroup Manager by installing it locally and managing the locals accounts or hardware that way. Obviously there's no need for a Server in that environment. Apart from the cost of the Macs themselves the other costs are for the external drives. I've typically seen this mostly in Junior Schools.
However it does depend on trust and a teacher with a watchful eye.
Whether the environment is AD-OD or purely OD you could consider using Portable Home Directories (PHDs) in OD or Mobile Accounts in AD. Home Profiles stored on the server are cached locally on successful log-in. Students are then able to work locally. Ideal for Media Studies Courses (Video/Graphics/Audio) as this method gets over the performance hit on the network. On successful log-out locally cached profiles are synchronized upstream to the Server. This can be defined as a managed preference. You can further define an Account Expiry MCX to delete the mobile account on successful log-out and sync. This gets over the problem of having hundreds of locally cached profiles filling up the local drive.
Ideally for the network you should be delivering at least a Gigabit to Desktop. Having said that I did an experiment at a school recently where I captured roughly 3-5 minutes of video using the built in cameras and iMovie 08 on a suite of 17 iMacs. All logged in with a single test AD student account. No OD involved. Video was captured successfully over the network. Saved successfully on profiles stored on AD and played back again over the network. All done on a 10/100 infrastructure and apart from a few stutters and the odd dropped frame it was actually OK!
However this was in summer recess with very little network traffic going on. I somehow doubt you'd see similar during term with the whole school logging on at the same time.
Yet again I've been to one site where the backbone was 3-Gigabit Fibre with a Gigabit to Desktop throughout. A suite of 24 iMacs capturing 15 minutes of video using iMovie 09 across the network and it was as smooth as silk. This was during the period prior to the summer break. Generally considered to be the busiest time.
The above is just a 'flavour' of what I've seen. As you can appreciate there are many many factors to consider and clearly mileage will vary. There are others on these Forums (Strontium90 is one) who regularly involve themselves with such things. Hopefully they might contribute as well?
You could check out or even cross-post on these Forums for more information:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=939
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=141
http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=96
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=832
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=810
http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/
If you know anyone in local TV/Film production talk to them. See what it is they do. Ultimately some students are going to hopefully end up in that field someday? Clearly from a teaching point of view alone it makes sense to acquaint them with what they would expect to see and how it works.
Tony