10 Gb Ethernet in Doremi ShowVault

[Joao Lopes]

Today's best solution (out of the box, for your case): Play from CRU/drive without ingest in real time "Play from Shipping Drive"! - Find a new IMS capable.

Second best solution: Optimize your system to ingest from and to USB 3.0 (5 Gbit/s, about ten times faster than USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s)) - You can ingest most of the movies in 20 to 30 minutes time.

So, forget ShowVault and old limitations or complicated transformations. See new IMS's like QSC CMS-5000 or Dolby IMS3000 and get the best performance from today's available technology!

[Carsten Kurz]

From what I heard, QSC has dropped the CMS-5000 before it could even lift off. Impressing hardware, but it seems that the market is not large enough for a newcomer, and Covid-19 didn't help either. They probably have inventory, but it has vanished from the website as well.

[Marcel Birgelen]

From what I heard, QSC has dropped the CMS-5000 before it could even lift off. Impressing hardware, but it seems that the market is not large enough for a newcomer, and Covid-19 didn't help either. They probably have inventory, but it has vanished from the website as well.

Valid answer, wrong topic?

[Leo Enticknap]

If it is possible to get running, the place I would see 10Gb/s networks as useful is if you are transferring content to multiple servers at once.

Which is why we would often install a 10Gb/s fiber NIC in the TMS computers we custom build for theaters, together with a MDF switch for the media LAN that has a 10Gb/s SFP port in it. Even if the transfer speed from the MDF through to an individual screen server is limited to 1 Gb/s, the TMS can pass content to several screen servers at once at the maximum speed at which they can write to their RAIDs.

[Leslie Hartmier]

Which is why we would often install a 10Gb/s fiber NIC in the TMS computers we custom build for theaters, together with a MDF switch for the media LAN that has a 10Gb/s SFP port in it. Even if the transfer speed from the MDF through to an individual screen server is limited to 1 Gb/s, the TMS can pass content to several screen servers at once at the maximum speed at which they can write to their RAIDs.

This is exactly the use case that I could see a 10Gb network being used for - 10Gb to the switch, then from the switch to the servers auto negotiating to 1Gb. You'll never overwhelm the network. Only downside is the speed of the repository, which would only truly benefit from the files being small, which as we all know, DCPs are not. 10Gb works best when there are multiple systems, all outfitted with 10Gb NICs, constantly transferring files of a reasonable size. Still, even a 2.5Gb network would function better than a purely 1Gb network, even if all servers except the TMS are limited to 1Gb.

[Ron Lacheur]

Second best solution: Optimize your system to ingest from and to USB 3.0 (5 Gbit/s, about ten times faster than USB 2.0 (0.48 Gbit/s)) - You can ingest most of the movies in 20 to 30 minutes time.

Was the Showvault kernel ever updated? Last time I used one, the kernel was on something like version 2.6. It wasn't compatible with even USB3.0. It would be handy to install USB3 PCI cards and have portable drives ingesting as fast as the CRU drives.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Well, 10GE cards have been around for a while now. You may have luck with Intel cards with one of the older chipsets, which are still readily available. Still, the kernel needs to be compiled with support for them or you need to get modules that are binary compatible with the Linux kernel.

[Carsten Kurz]

It was a 2.6.18.2 kernel. Since Doremi SW 2.8.18 or something, it is a later kernel, when they added 4TB drive support, but still none of the current breeds. I have to look up my notes...

[Yuri Mamaev]

I’ve successfully installed the USB 3.0 cards and 10G old adapter in my DCP2000 and Showvaults (we’ve several X7SBE based servers in our rental). Dolby added support for USB 3.0 as they moved to X10 range of motherboards, just use 2.8 software version and select the chipsets supported by that kernel. Using PCI-E adapter in X7 board will still limit you to the speed of the PCI-E x1 1.0 bus.

The 10G ethernet does not provide much difference (just 2x speeds if configured properly and upload optimized, looks like limited by the RAID setup we use, will try on 4 drive servers later). And found that these old board are maxed to 6Gbit due to PCI-X. Will investigate speeds later on.

[Carsten Kurz]

Quite interesting. Would you share the type of controllers you used? I think for USB3.0, there's just two common types anyway - NEC/Renesas and VIA, if I remember correctly.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I think that any old PCI-X Intel NIC will be a safe bet. They've been in the Linux kernel forever, as they started to appear in servers as standard-options back in the late 2000s.

[Lucas Iaccarino]

Dear all.
I´m updating you: We are uploading our network to assure excess bandwidth to the Doremis (2 Doremi SW feeded with 10Gb) so we can calculate the best ingest speed 1Gb Ethernet can provide.
After this, and comparing with the 1Gb network for both, we will proceed to check if we can try what Yuri says.

I will let you know
Thanks

[Justin d'Entremont]

Any update Lucas?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The answer to this is actually short and simple. Even if you install a 10 gb network card in the equipment connected to a 10 GB network, it is highly unlikely you will see much, if any, speed increase unless the rest of that equipment's internals are also designed to support that 10 gb speed.

[Yuri Mamaev]

Quite interesting. Would you share the type of controllers you used? I think for USB3.0, there's just two common types anyway - NEC/Renesas and VIA, if I remember correctly.

You can simply find that in the documentation to the linux kernel ) NEC/Renesas was the first supported, and is the only one safely supported in any version.

We've even tested the NFS transfers, which are really faster, then FTP (takes much less CPU), and there are a few ways to skip hash and index processes during ingest (or you can play from NFS anyway).

The new IMS / ICMP are much slower, than dedicated storage. Though I think the IMS3000 with NFS storage could be modified to get maximum upload speed of the 10G network (you'll need to have good technician for that). Or you can create your own Showvault system without limitations of the original (though I've not got any other 10G board .ko's working due to missing kernel sources (those are specially modified for Doremi)).