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Premiere Pro supports both Windows and macOS. For both OSes, the file sharing protocol used should be SMB2 or SMB3.
SMB3 has many benefits, but for Premiere Pro workflows the most notable is SMB3 multichannel. SMB3 multichannel automatically aggregates multiple network links from the client system to a supported storage server (such as PowerScale!)
Configuration of SMB3 multichannel is out of scope for this document. Essentially if the client has multiple network connections to the PowerScale storage, the client system will balance traffic between the multiple links resulting in higher aggregate throughput and failover. This is entirely different and separate from bonded network links (LACP and similar).
In a test where the PowerScale storage was connected using 100 GbE to a network switch and the Premiere Pro Windows client had 2x 10 GbE connections to the same network switch, playback of material that would have otherwise overwhelmed a single 10 GbE network was possible.
SMB3 is also the recommended protocol for macOS.
That SMB is also the preferred protocol for macOS may come as surprise to experienced macOS administrators. Historically NFS was the highest performing connection protocol on macOS. However, in recent versions of macOS, Apple’s SMBX software has seen significant improvements and now outperforms NFS for multithreaded operations such as video edit in Premiere Pro.
Configuration and optimization of the client SMB stack is outside of the scope of this document and is covered elsewhere.
Regardless of connection protocol, for high throughput workflows, and especially for network connections of 10 GbE and greater, use of Jumbo frames (9000mtu) can have a significant positive impact. However, care must be taken that the entire connection from PowerScale storage to network switch to workstations are properly configured for the benefit of jumbo frames to be recognized. Simply enabling jumbo frames on the client or storage can negatively impact performance if the rest of the environment is not properly configured.