1.5TB SAN for $35K -- this is how we do it...

[Rohit Khare]

This is how we do it, my homies -- a real geek knows what the real 
deal is, and knows how to stick it to the man!

Jan. 1, 2002 Issue of CIO Magazine
	 
LEW GOLDSTEIN IS a sound supervisor editor for C5 Inc. in New York 
City. C5 does postproduction audio for major motion pictures-which 
means it creates or embellishes every sound you hear in a movie from 
a dog bark to every spoken word. They put the hurricane in Cape Fear. 
The woodchipper in Fargo too.

Goldstein is also a closet IT guy. To store all those space-hogging 
audio clips, he built a 1.5 terabyte storage area network (SAN). He 
did this without a SAN vendor and for less than $35,000, a third of 
what vendors charge for equipment alone-never mind pesky consulting 
and integration fees.

His SAN has never crashed. Once, he unplugged it on purpose in an 
attempt to cross it up. When he plugged it back in, sound editors 
returned to work as if nothing had happened.

Goldstein didn't set out to build a SAN because SANs are trendy. He 
did it because the transition from tape to digital editing was 
wreaking all sorts of havoc in audio postproduction. Digital audio 
files are big, and Goldstein has more than 45,000 of them. Every 
sound from the natural world-and thousands not of this world-is 
stored on a server's hard drive at C5. Most of them are bigger than 
1MB. Here's a tiny sample: In Get Shorty, a 20-second clip of a 767 
flying overhead was 8MB. Goldstein has gigabytes of "dins," which are 
long stretches of ambient city noise. Some dins run 15 minutes 
(120MB). Goldstein has a file called Aircraft Toilet Flush. He has a 
folder called simply Blowtorches.

C5 not only edits the sounds; it creates them. Each new movie (he 
recently finished Men in Black 2) involves 15 days of recording with 
"foley artists," people who are recorded knocking on a door or 
walking on gravel and so forth. Hundreds of audio files emerge from 
that work.

Work processes also contributed to C5's storage problem. Because 
editors at C5 couldn't share files, they made local copies of 
everything they worked on. They also made 6GB local copies of the 
movies in order to sync sound and picture. At any one time, C5 is 
working on four major motion pictures plus several documentaries and 
indie films, each having up to six editors. On top of that, directors 
will often change entire sections of movies during audio 
postproduction, which means everyone will stop what they're doing, 
upload their work, wait for the new video file, make a new local copy 
and then start editing again.

Vendors offered to sell Goldstein a SAN, of course, but they wouldn't 
sell him what he wanted. If he wanted just an empty rack to put his 
own hard drives in, they'd tell him he had to buy the drives, too, at 
enormous markups. If he wanted fibre channel, they tried to sell him 
on SCSI-a technology his research taught him to avoid. One vendor 
offered a discount if he would beta-test its SAN. He thought that 
sounded like he would be working for them instead of the other way 
around.

A SAN, Goldstein says, is just a big rack of hard drives everyone 
shares. With a hobbyist's background and some dedicated research, he 
was able to learn the technology on his own and avoid vendors' 
upselling, technology biases, and their price tags.

Goldstein did have to call on a couple of vendors to complete his 
first SAN. He bought fibre channel switches and PCI-to-fibre channel 
cards. He found a humble little company that sold him empty racks at 
a good price.

He picked up 10 9GB drives on eBay. He spent $51. Total.

Don't scoff. They've never crashed.

He put each $5.10 eBay drive in one of the empty racks and connected 
the rack to the switches that in turn connected to four end users. "I 
slapped it together, and it worked," Goldstein says. "I had probably 
spent less than $5,000 at this point."

The thing hummed, and C5's editors started jumping on board. Four 
nodes became eight. Eight became 16. Soon, every sound editor was 
connected. Users could share files. No more local replications. The 
editing process became more efficient and more collaborative. 
Goldstein believes without his SAN, C5 couldn't have pulled off the 
audio postproduction on Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee 
was dissatisfied with much of the movie's audio, and he leaned on C5. 
With the SAN, multiple members of the crack team could work 
simultaneously on a file. By the old method, each editor had to wait 
for the previous one to finish his work and upload it.

The system keeps growing. Goldstein now buys 73GB drives for about 
$700 each-still a minor theft. He has more than 3 racks running 1.5 
terabytes of storage. He just added 500GB without a hitch. Each 
editor gets his own 20GB workspace, and each has access to the 
archive of 39,000 (and growing) audio files. In fact, Goldstein finds 
SAN-building so straightforward, he now sells them on the side.

The sounds of Scorcese's New York, every wistful breeze in an Ang Lee 
film, every Coen brothers gunshot is sitting there on Lew Goldstein's 
first SAN at C5. That's probably a billion dollars in ticket 
receipts, and Goldstein has yet to spend $35,000.

Senior Writer Scott Berinato loves a bargain. E-mail him at sberinato@cio.com.