BEST PRACTICES FOR INTEGRATING TELESTREAM VANTAGE WITH EMC ISILON ONEFS

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1 Best Practices Guide BEST PRACTICES FOR INTEGRATING TELESTREAM VANTAGE WITH EMC ISILON ONEFS Abstract This best practices guide contains details for integrating Telestream Vantage workflow design and automation software with the EMC Isilon OneFS 6.5 file system. July 2013

2 Copyright 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. EMC believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. The information in this publication is provided as is. EMC Corporation makes no representations or warranties of any kind with respect to the information in this publication, and specifically disclaims implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Use, copying, and distribution of any EMC software described in this publication requires an applicable software license. For the most up-to-date listing of EMC product names, see EMC Corporation Trademarks on EMC.com. EMC 2, EMC, the EMC logo, Isilon, OneFS, InsightIQ, SmartCache, and SmartConnect are registered trademarks or trademarks of EMC Corporation in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. Part Number H

3 Table of contents Introduction... 4 Typical Vantage domain configuration... 4 Isilon cluster design... 6 Telestream Vantage service configuration... 7 Telestream Vantage management... 8 About EMC Isilon

4 Introduction Telestream is the leading provider of enterprise-class video transcoding and workflow software. The world s leading media and entertainment companies trust the combined Telestream and EMC Isilon solutions to automate the production of content for broadcast, video on demand, IP television, cinema, and mobile devices. The complementary Telestream Vantage and EMC Isilon scalable architectures easily adapt to constantly changing workflows. Servers are added to a multiserver Vantage domain to meet the industry s increased demand for transcoding, analysis, metadata processing, and quality control services as needed. As the bandwidth and storage requirements for Vantage workflows increase, EMC Isilon scales to meet these demands. EMC Isilon customers add storage nodes to linearly increase bandwidth and capacity, without introducing downtime and the risk of missing a critical content delivery deadline. This best practices guide details how EMC Isilon OneFS 6.5 and Telestream Vantage are combined to rapidly deploy new media workflows. EMC Isilon clustered storage utilizes standard storage protocols like SMB, NFS, FTP, HDFS, HTTP, and Object APIs. The added cost and infrastructure constraints of a Fibre Channel storage area network are no longer an issue when scaling workflow automation. Telestream follows common IT data center best-practices in their own documentation for deploying Vantage in a NAS environment. Compared to other media and entertainment applications, there is very little performance tuning or custom configuration required when integrating Telestream Vantage with EMC Isilon OneFS. Typical Vantage domain configuration The Telestream Vantage application consists of a central Microsoft SQL Server database and an array of servers running the distributed Vantage services. The database tracks a queue of automated workflow actions that are allocated to the array of servers running the Vantage services. Vantage workflow actions include media content processing features, such as transcoding, ITU 1770 audio loudness correction, quality control, metadata extraction, media format analysis, file delivery, fingerprinting, and logo insertion. Queued actions that become active are intelligently distributed to the best available server in the array, based on a comparison of workflow status and server resource availability. The Vantage array configuration is tuned to run enough concurrent jobs on each server that the CPU utilization stays around 80 percent on every core of every server running the Vantage services. If the Vantage servers have been configured to run at greater than 80 percent CPU utilization, there is a risk of temporary service failure and reduced workflow performance. Transcoding is a CPU-intensive action. Typically, transcode workflows decode from a mezzanine-quality media compression format, like MPEG 2, and encode to a highly compressed format, such as H.264. The most common bottleneck in these workflows is the speed at which a decoded file may be encoded to new media formats before running out of CPU resources. As a result, it is common for a single 12-core Vantage server running concurrent transcode jobs to generate less than 100 megabytes per second of read access while decoding, and less than 10 megabytes per second write access while simultaneously encoding to multiple output formats. 4

5 While the moderate bandwidth of a typical Vantage server configuration is easily handled by a non-blocking Gigabit Ethernet switch like the Cisco 3750, workflows are like snowflakes they are never identical. A workflow that decodes from an uncompressed media format and encodes to another format with a low CPU cost may demand a multihomed configuration with a dedicated 10 gigabit private network when connecting to network-attached storage. It is possible for a single 12-core Vantage server to generate up to 400 megabytes per second of read traffic in a transcode workflow when processing multiple high-definition media assets. Vantage is tuned to assign different weights to different servers in its framework. Thus, a newer server with faster CPUs is added to the array and the array is tuned to prefer the faster server when allocating new CPU-intensive actions. In a typical installation of Telestream Vantage with EMC Isilon clustered storage, workflow queue depth and wait time are the metrics tracked to determine when additional compute or bandwidth resources are required. Figure 1. Typical Telestream Vantage server installation diagram For more information on planning a multiserver Vantage installation, please see the Telestream Vantage Installation Guide. 5

6 Isilon cluster design Since the Isilon network-attached storage platform is not hindered by a single head for scaling network throughput, there is no need to size OneFS 6.5 performance for a worst case scenario. OneFS 6.5 scales to meet changing bandwidth and capacity requirements by simply adding nodes to the cluster. When sizing an Isilon cluster for a new installation, Vantage server performance is benchmarked using local storage in order to determine bandwidth requirements for a single server in the array at 80 percent CPU utilization. After determining the required workflow throughput requirements for a single server in your Vantage installation, work with an EMC Isilon sales representative to determine the server to storage node ratio required for your environment. The Telestream Vantage workflow is well-suited for the EMC Isilon X200 series storage node. The X200 hardware configuration may be tailored to meet your particular workflow requirements by specifying drive capacity, adding 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and increasing RAM. The X200 may be fitted with SSD drives to store some or all of the file system metadata, a feature that is useful when working with digital intermediary and broadcast graphics workflows with image sequences consisting of thousands of DPX or TARGA files. If you require accelerated read performance for image sequence files, contact your EMC Isilon support representative about the performance tuning settings for pre-fetching image sequences into cache. The most bandwidth-intensive actions in most Vantage workflows are simple FTP or SMB2 file movements. For example, a transcode workflow that generates an output format to be used on a broadcast video server can include an FTP task to move the file from Isilon to the video server s local storage. Given the highly distributed nature of the Telestream Vantage server array, the default OneFS file system configuration is optimal for most workflows. EMC Isilon OneFS directories used by Telestream Vantage work well with Concurrency set as the data access pattern, SmartCache-enabled. A new cluster expecting growth from an active transcode workflow should use a data protection level of 2:1, meaning the file system is protected against the failure of either an entire node or two drives from any nodes in the cluster. These settings are the file system defaults for OneFS 6.5. File system parameters such as parity, SSD metadata acceleration, and data access patterns may be customized at the folder or file level, regardless of the default file system settings, to meet different application performance or data protection requirements. Please refer to the OneFS 6.5 User Guide for more information on file system settings. Since OneFS 6.5 is a single file system designed from the ground up to handle massively concurrent file access, there is little need to move files in a transcoding workflow utilizing the Telestream Vantage API for workflow orchestration. Large Telestream Vantage workflow automation environments often utilize source media managed by a central media asset management application. OneFS 6.5 is designed to be the central repository for ingest, media asset management, editing, and archive workflows. A proper media production workflow design utilizes a common share for media assets that is available as a read-only volume to all users in the media production workflow, and as a read/write volume to the group of automated services responsible for media asset management, content storage management, and ingest. This design 6

7 ensures that the managed assets are only deleted or modified through an auditable media asset management action that can be traced back to the responsible service and user requesting the service. Without NTFS access control lists to enforce read-only access to a central repository of managed assets, the workflow is at risk of accumulating orphaned media that is not tracked by asset management. The workflow is also at risk of generating invalid asset records in the media asset management database due to unmanaged file deletion or modification. Properly planned NTFS access control list creation greatly reduces the need for resource-intensive processes that constantly troll terabytes to petabytes of storage to validate the integrity of your media asset management database against physical storage. In current media asset management workflows, the media files behind managed assets are never modified. Managed media assets are either read by a nondestructive process that saves changes to the media in externalized project metadata and render files, as is the case with nonlinear editing workflows, or, as is the case with transcode workflows, a source file is often read, decoded to RAM, and encoded back to a new file in a different location than the source file. Transcode services write derivative files to an EMC Isilon OneFS folder with NTFS access control lists permitting write, modify, and delete access rights for both the Vantage services and any external services used in the content delivery pipeline. OneFS 6.5 intelligently moves files into a globally coherent cache built from the RAM of every node in the cluster, eliminating the risk of disk contention when multiple clients access the same file asset concurrently from multiple workflows. The capacity of this cache is not bound to a single storage head as it is with other network-attached storage solutions. On a five-node cluster in which each node contains 24 gigabytes of cache, there is 120 gigabytes of RAM that a single file may be cached in for concurrent read access. When the RAM in each node of the cluster is upgraded to 48 gigabytes, the coherent cache of the cluster is upgraded to 240 gigabytes. The cluster can be expanded without disrupting the Vantage workflow by adding five more nodes, bringing the cluster coherent cache to 480 gigabytes, and so on. Telestream Vantage is rarely the only service accessing storage in an automated transcoding workflow, so you should allocate bandwidth for ancillary applications such as content ingest and streaming playback. Consider the delivery method for the output media when designing an EMC Isilon OneFS clustered storage environment. The EMC Isilon OneFS operating system offers native support for the industry-standard Aspera fasp high-performance file-transfer server software used by content distributors around the globe. Telestream Vantage service configuration For best performance, install Telestream Vantage on the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system and use EMC Isilon OneFS v6.5.4 or greater. Windows Server 2008, Vista, and Windows 7 will automatically negotiate an SMB2 connection with EMC Isilon OneFS v6.5 and above. Thanks to improvements, such as support for multiple SMB commands within a single packet and larger buffer sizes, SMB2 performance is more than twice that of SMB1 over Gigabit Ethernet and three times greater over higher-latency WAN connections. 7

8 While Vantage works with SMB, FTP, and HTTP as file transfer protocols, any file location that is to be used for a transcoding or analysis action must be configured to use UNC paths to an SMB share in order to process media. SMB shares should be entered in the Vantage Management Console or Vantage Workflow Designer in the format \\server\share, where \\server is the fully qualified domain name of an EMC Isilon SmartConnect zone using static IP allocation, and \share is an SMB share on said EMC Isilon cluster. SMB shares mapped as Windows drive letters are only supported in a single-server Vantage installation. In a multiserver installation, all Telestream servers must join the same Microsoft Windows domain as the EMC Isilon cluster. Please refer to the support center for more information about authentication sources. Each Telestream Vantage server must use Microsoft Windows Active Directory user authentication for the installed Vantage services. Figure 2. Vantage services On each Vantage server go to Programs, Administrative Tools, and launch the Services console. Scroll to the services beginning with the prefix Vantage, right click, select properties, and select the Log On tab. By default, the Vantage services will install configured to run as Local System. Change the Log On service property for each Vantage service to use a dedicated Microsoft Windows Active Directory domain user account. Do not use a domain user account for the Vantage service authentication that is already in use by an employee or another application. If the account is subject to a lock out policy after too many domain authentication failures, the entire array could go offline until the account is unlocked. The Active Directory user account used for Vantage services should have the User cannot change password and Password never expires account options enabled. Telestream Vantage management In order to simplify Vantage workflow creation and management, determine which storage locations are required and create a Vantage Store or Vantage Folder for each UNC location under the storage section of the Vantage Management Console. A Vantage Store is a managed location that will delete files once they are no longer referenced by a Vantage workflow binder. Files on OneFS directories configured as Vantage Stores are deleted upon job completion or catalog expiration date. Since some transcode workflows create temporary media files that are cleaned up at the 8

9 completion of the job, Vantage Stores can be particularly helpful in managing the proliferation of temporary files that are not deleted due to an unexpected job failure. Figure 3. Vantage Management Console A Vantage Folder is an unmanaged file location that does not delete files. Vantage Folders may be configured in either the Vantage Console or in the Vantage Workflow Designer. Vantage Folders are managed in an address book for easy access when building new workflows in Vantage Workflow Designer. Vantage workflows are initiated via an API call including the UNC path to the source file for the job or a monitor action defined in the Vantage Workflow Designer. Vantage monitor actions include watch actions and associative actions. A watch action will poll an EMC Isilon SMB shared folder or FTP site to check for a file pattern match, while an associate action expects a specific file, such as a metadata file output by another Vantage action. Vantage watch actions are assigned to Vantage Stores and Vantage Folders in order to assign a file matching pattern for an automation watch folder. The file matching pattern should contain inclusive wildcards that identify a range of file extensions suitable for the workflow and a filter to exclude unwanted client OS index files such as.ds_store and Thumbs.db. 9

10 Figure 4. Vantage watch action configuration Mac OS clients prior to 10.7 can also create AppleDouble structured data pointer files for each file they write to an SMB volume. For example, a Mac OS 10.6 client copying a 100 gigabyte file named media.mov to an SMB share can inadvertently create a 100 gigabyte media.mov file and a 6 kilobyte AppleDouble file named._media.mov. Apple support knowledge base article HT4017 details how to resolve this issue by enabling Alternate Data Streams support on managed Mac OS clients. In an environment containing unmanaged Mac OS clients, AppleDouble files are hidden from Telestream Vantage watch actions by enabling the Hide dot files advanced security parameter for the SMB share. Advanced SMB share parameters are to be modified from the EMC Isilon Web administration user interface page for an individual share, not the global SMB parameter UI. Contact your EMC Isilon support representative before making uninformed changes to the advanced SMB parameters. Telestream Vantage workflow automation is a powerful tool for today s constantly changing media content creation landscape. The constant addition and expiration of workflows creates a reporting challenge for traditional media asset management and traffic systems. When planning your workflow monitoring and reporting procedures, talk to your EMC Isilon sales representative about EMC Isilon InsightIQ. InsightIQ maintains historical data about performance, capacity, and file analytics. Start your InsightIQ data collection when you launch your first Telestream Vantage workflow. The InsightIQ reporting interface is an invaluable resource for trending the storage, bandwidth, and file system impact of your workflows. InsightIQ allows media professionals to intelligently budget for the storage and network bandwidth their workflows will need, before it is needed. 10

11 About EMC Isilon As the global leader in scale-out storage, Isilon delivers powerful yet simple solutions for enterprises that want to manage their data, not their storage. Isilon products are simple to install, manage and scale, at any size. And, unlike traditional enterprise storage, Isilon stays simple no matter how much storage is added, how much performance is required or how business needs change in the future. Information about Isilon can be found at 11