BAVC Hardware Configuration

At BAVC we are introducing a new piece to the standard Open Media configuration. Similar to using an external box as the FFMPEG encoder that accepts encoding instructions from the webserver using a simple encode.php file, we are going to execute the mv and cp commands for managing files to a Samba Server. That server will be on BAVC's internal network while the website will be hosted at Media Temple (mt). This is a unique configuration because they are able to connect the webserver at Media Temple (mt) to smb mounts in their internal network. This isn't possible with most webhosts.

We are also moving the Ingest share producers drop files into to an XServer along with the Originals directory Media Mover uses in the first step of the encoding process. The MPEGs will be written to BAVC's internal RAID as they are created, but the flv and jpg will be written to the Media Temple server.

We're moving DOM to a similar configuration as well. One of the issue we've run into is when the webserver is operating under a high load, producers attempting to export an MPEG have experienced errors writing to the Ingest folder in the edit lab. This error manifested itself in the worst possible way by just hanging the export with no error. Producers would wait for their export to finish, but that never happened. No trace of the file existed and the producer had to restart the export and hope it worked the second time.

This is really the spec for a cadillac Open Media configuration that leverages several existing pieces of hardware in BAVC's infrastructure.