It’s been awhile since I talked about this, as things have been moving a little slow.  However, over the past week we have made the final steps in getting out video data protected in a manner that helps me sleep better at night.

About a month ago, we installed a PC and drive chassis in our editing room.  This system has 2 2.8TB RAID5 arrays (with 2 additional hot spares drives) that will do nothing but hold video data, SFX, production music, and final cut project files.  We’ve been slowly moving old projects and new finished work onto these arrays over the past couple of weeks.

Yesterday morning, I installed a new gigabit switch in our IDF that serves the editing and control rooms.  This switch also links back to our MDF, and so we now have a much faster link back to our servers.

Finally, earlier this evening, I was able to get our editing storage server talking to our Galaxy Express backup server using some VLAN voodoo and an extra network card.  Our network is mixed 100/1000, so we opted to do our backing up on a separate network.  Since our video server is the first server NOT to be in the rack, I opened up a new VLAN and routed it back to the switch in the server rack that connects the “backup network.”

Note to self:  Time to update the Visio charts of our network layout.  Yippee.

Seriously, I don’t know why I ever considered NOT buying managed switches.  Sure I would save money, but I would be at a serious disadvantage when it came time to do stuff like this.