THE NEED


Dakota Video & Post Productions is a studio that does high-end audio & video editing with a customer base of 2000-3000 clients. There are four Mac-based nonlinear editors working on various requests such as making commercials for car dealers or trade schools nationwide. With all of the studio’s workstations running the same applications on the same platform in shared storage, it’s clear that the priority need for the studio is to build a new network infrastructure with a shared storing system and high-bandwidth network that are fast and efficient enough for standard definition video (SD) streaming, and possibly high definition (HD) in the future.


 


THE SOLUTION


Small Tree Communications (www.small-tree.com) , an expert in Mac Networking and the sponsor of Post Magazines ‘Extreme Mac-Over Contest’, are chosen to provide the solution that fits the needs. Considering that Dakota Video already had one Apple RAID with transfer rate up to 180mb/sec, Small Tree decide that the solution will work over Gigabit. The solution is to put in a second network over an Edge-Core’s 24-port Gigabit Ethernet Switch (Model No. ES4524D). The ES4524D, featuring 24 RJ-45 10/100/1000 ports and 4 combo Gigabit Ethernet RJ-45/SFP ports, allowing the use of jumbo frame (to 9000 bytes instead of 1500 bytes) from the new server to the desktops and provides advanced switching features such as full IPv6 support, line-rate performance, dynamic 802.3ad link aggregation and IGMP snooping. It also supports Apple Power Mac G5 with PCI Express, the Mac Pro and the Intel-based Xserve.


 


‘We set up link aggregation on the server and that let it load balance all of his clients together so they would always get good bandwidth out of the available ports on the system,’ says Steve Modica, CTO of  Small Tree Communications.


 


Small Tree then set up other applications to jumbo frames, including a new Apple Xserve with 4GB of memory, a quad port Gigabit card that run to Edge-Core ES4524D, and the second, unused ports on the Intel Macs that were given new IP addresses. ‘So now,’ says Modica, ‘the server and the clients were all speaking jumbo frames. In addition, we put a Small Tree single port card into one of his older machines to give it a second port. Then we hooked them all up together and all of those systems are able to edit right off that server because the bandwidth is low enough and the jumbo frames make it fast enough, that it is all workable.’


 


RESULTS: ‘IT WORKS GREAT! ‘


The installation was quick and smooth. ‘Get good switches,’ said Modica. ‘It’s not the bandwidth, it’s the latency. What we did with Curtis was install a really nice switch that has low latency. And the switch can stay with him and continue to provide good service.’


 


Curt Friesen, the owner of Dakota Video, is very happy with the results. ‘Here comes the Mac-Over contest and Small Tree coming in and saying, we have a little bit different of a solution than spending 40 to 50 thousand dollars, using the techniques of the jumbo frames, a shared storage server and running a separate network,’ Friesen added. ‘It allowed us to test an alternate way to see if it worked, and it does. It works great, and would have been well under $10,000.’


 


‘The successful deployment of Edge-Core’s switch into Dakota Video is an inspiring case to us.’  Said Charles Chen, Senior Director of Accton Brand Business Unit. ‘We are honored to work with Small Tree Communications, our value partner, to provide high quality switches to the expert in Mac networking fields and prove the ability to deliver a network with outstanding features and best-fit the needs of various customers, including power users and small enterprises.’


 


 


Introducing the Edge-Core L2 Gigabit Ethernet Standalone Switch – ES4524D


ES4524D is ideal for high performance server aggregations, such as enterprise data centers, to connect high-end or network attached file servers over copper ports. High speed workgroups backbone upgrades, and Gigabit to the desktop for power users. The whole stack can be managed as a single entity with a single IP address. With 48Gbps switching capacity, the ES4524D delivers wire-speed switching performance on all gigabit ports, allowing users to take full advantage of existing high-performance. There are four Gigabit Ethernet combo ports for uplink flexibility, allowing copper or fiber uplinks.