Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: NFS over RDMA for Media > Using NFS over RDMA for media creation workflows
High resolution and high frame rate video are widely adopted for modern content creation. Adoption of Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) on Dell EMC PowerScale ensures that storytellers can seamlessly use these formats. Streaming providers have turbo charged the pace of new content. PowerScale OneFS provides the performance and peace of mind that creators can keep up with the opportunities ahead.
PowerScale OneFS’s new NFS over RDMA implementation results in dramatic performance increases in storage performance and reductions in workstation CPU utilization. RDMA allows for high frame-rate and high-resolution playback on PowerScale that was previously the domain of Fibre Channel SAN storage. Playing and processing this content is challenging even for modern CPUs. RDMA reduces the CPU cycles required to use network storage, reserving more cycles for displaying and processing video.
RDMA is a technology that has been around for some time. However, its adoption has mostly been in the high-performance computing industry. With the release of OneFS 9.2, the PowerScale family of storage makes adoption of NFS over RDMA a reality for content producers.
I have recently completed NFS over RDMA testing with media applications at the Dell Media lab in Seattle, WA and the Dell Solutions lab in Round Rock, TX. The tests show excellent results in low-latency and high throughput workflows. Simply mounting the OneFS file system using RDMA (as opposed to TCP) made a huge difference in terms of storage performance and workstation CPU utilization.
This white paper provides details about RDMA, high-resolution professional video formats, and how all these technologies come together on PowerScale OneFS.
OneFS uses the RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCEv2) protocol for doing RDMA traffic. This is an effective combination In the professional video world, there is a lot of interest in high frame rates and 8K resolution. Understanding how these standards impact storage utilization and workstation performance is crucial to success. Storage is a big part of the equation, but it is not the whole equation. Workstation CPU load can be just as consequential, as the following sections describe.