I'd like to offer (or ask for) some clarifications.

Of course, you cannot expect the same performance with Animation files on a dedicated RAID vs. a SAN.

Who said? Why not? Half the point of a SAN is to bring local-drive performance to the network (the other half is sharing it), and to have comparable performance to a local RAID. Of course, there's a big "it depends" - the SAN has to be optimized, built of sufficiently fast components, avoid excessive load, etc.

ScottRwn wrote:

I've read a lot on Premiere and it's problems with XSAN

Where did you find a lot of reading about Premiere problems with XSAN? I've been researching PPro+XSAN for months and found perhaps 2 threads discussing problems, all other evidence point to it working fine. I'm not talking about sharing projects and media, though. PPro CS6 does not support project sharing and you have to be careful about sharing media. In this regard yes, there are definitely problems, but this thread hasn't been about project and/or media sharing.

By the way, we've been using PPro CS6 on a SAN and NAS here at our facility for months. Our Mac Pro clients connect over fiber to an old Avid Unity 4.2, and the projects reside on the NAS. PPro has been working well, in fact being more stable than our Avid bays. We're in preparations to retire the Unity and migrate our facility to PPro+XSAN with the help of a system integrator, although yes, we have to largely give up shared workflows (Adobe Anywhere notwithstanding).

Speaking of which, I'm also a bit surprised that Kevin recommended sending Adobe SAN support feature requests - as a fairly involved end-user it seems obvious that Adobe is very focused on Adobe Anywhere which will be their answer to shared workflows. I have no expectations from Adobe to offer anything new as far as SAN until they release Anywhere and we assess what it can (and cannot) do.

Hi Scott!

I have the same problem like You or Your IT-Dept.......working with Adobe Premiere Pro over a central storage

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1166877

I will give a try to some tests in the upcoming weeks with some constellations of Hard- & Software.

As I`ve read, You are working on a HP Z400 machine so did You ever try RGS (RemoteGraphicSoftware) from HP itself?

http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/workstations/remote-graphics -software.html

If You are working with RGS the HP Z400 is attached directly to the storage and with a thin client You are connecting to the Z400, this is somethin like a performant remote desktop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28RMuXqRemc

Adobe is working on a solution like RGS and it`s called "Adobe Anywhere" but it`s just known that Adobe will release this in 2013 but no-one knows the releasedate.

ScottRwn wrote:

Something is not configured correctly and I'm running out of ideas.

Something is not configured correctly and it's out of your control...

ScottRwn wrote:

 

The point of my asking in this forum is to gather facts on whether or not CS6 works with a SAN. As an editor/motion graphics artist, I'm playing IT to get my workflow working fast. Since our IT department has no idea what Premiere or After Effects are, I'm having to research this problem. 

Premiere can definitely run on a SAN. The devil is in the details, and there's a million of them. One of the simpler things to do, like Kevin said, is to try abandoning Animation in favor of ProRes4444. If that works for you, great. Another simple option is to avoid the IT dept. hassle and edit off your GSpeed. It may well be that PPro CS6 can work in certain Mac SAN configurations but is doomed on Windows networks.

Many users and editorial departments are in your situation, unfortunately, where they're at the mercy of the IT people. They may be experts on SQL data deduplication but are clueless about video. You need true cooperation and willingness to research and hire the right consultants/integrators if you want a good working system.

 

Kevin Monahan wrote:

The point is to not use Animation codec for intermediate use. It's somply not done in today's post environments.

 

I guess we should stop using it, then :-)  Actually you're right, I have been phasing it out at our facility. When we use it, it's for its intended purpose - rendering graphics with alpha. I agree that it's a dubious choice as an intermediate video codec.

I'm also glad that one of our clients (a Fortune 500 company) stopped asking for AVI Cinepak files a few months ago :-)

You're right, there's not a lot of info out there, but here's what one of our engineers said

Joe beat me to it... I'm very familiar with this comment from Mitch Wood, and as Joe pointed out, it's nearly 2 years old. I wrote to Mitch and never heard back, I'll touch base again with Van Bedient (who's been very helpful) and see if he can help.

As far as data rates go, you can get faster disk speeds on a dedicated RAID over a SAN, which also has to take redundancy into account. SANs can be fast enough for standard video files, but the Animation codec has a very high data rate. Too much for some SAN systems for reliable playback and redundancy.

A SAN will be slightly slower than the same storage mounted directly, but you confused the cause. Taking redundancy into account is what RAID does (RAID0 notwithstanding). A RAID5 DAS will be slower than a RAID0 DAS, and conversely, you can run a SAN without redundancy (just look at any Avid Unity SAN with workspace mirroring disabled).

You're right that some or most SANs are slower than typical latest-generation DAS, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's all in the details. 8Gb fiber is becoming commonplace, and DVS, Hitachi or GVG will gladly build you a (very expensive) SAN that will handle Animation codec as well as multiple streams of uncompressed 4K.

I don't want people finding this thread and concluding that PPro CS6 + SAN = fail (it doesn't help Adobe sales either ;-) . Premiere is fairly storage-agnostic as far as NLEs go, but networked video storage is complicated. There are many parameters, limitations, and considerations that make the difference between a working and a non-working solution, as Scott has been experiencing.

I'd like to reinstate that I'm delighted by the communication, cooperation and vibe I've been getting from Adobe nowadays, from staffers in the forums to corporate policy. Better by leaps and bounds than a certain fruit company.