Serving from USB 3.0 RAID, plus CPU/RAM/SSD effects

Wowza Streaming Engine
1

Hello!

Any concerns about serving videos from (and recording live streams to) a USB 3.0 enclosure? We are looking at this 20 TB one (7200 RPM, 4x128 MB cache) in a RAID 10 setup:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/M3QX2T20%2E0S/

We currently run 2x1TB internal SATA drives (7200 RPM, 32 MB cache each) in a RAID 0 setup and they work fine for our low-traffic site, but they are 5 years old and we want more storage for archiving video. Just wondering about the implications of going external.

Both our live and VOD streaming have a pretty slow trickle of viewers (maybe 30 total at any given time), but we also like to use Wowza to record 4-16 simultaneous incoming live streams for backup during the day too.

Also, with a modest server CPU (2.6GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7), is it worth getting more than 4 GB RAM? Or is the CPU going to be a bottleneck before memory anyway? We’ve run 4 GB fine in the past and we’re not really looking to push performance, just targeting potentially worthwhile upgrades.

Finally, would an SSD boot drive be advantageous for Wowza in any way?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

An external storage device which is available via USB shouldn’t be an issue to use as a storage directory for recording files and playing them back as video on demand content.

I don’t see any real benefit to using a SSD boot disk at this time, if you plan on having more concurrent viewers streaming the VOD content then I would consider in the future.

To scale video on demand we have MediaCache which can access content using a network file store or web-server and cache it for a limited time allowing the local/faster disks to serve clients with the content needed at that time. This may be something you want to look at if you need to support more concurrent connections.

The bottleneck is likely going to be bandwidth (depending on file bitrate) or disk speed. I don’t think more RAM is necessary for described setup.

Regards,

Jason

3

Thanks Jason!