FAQ

What does DDP mean?
DDP stands for Dynamic Drive Pool. The name Dynamic Drive Pool means a pool of storage from which virtual or logical drives can be created of which the size can be dynamically enlarged.

What special features does the DDP offer?
The most important feature is the DDP's very high sustained data rate. The integration of iSCSI with AVFS gives a number of professional built-in features for daily operations.

How many users can I connect when doing ProRes HQ, DNxHD, 2K and/or audio?
There is a DDP for any number of users with any format. The choices are the size of the DDP, number of GbE or 10 GbE ports, hard disks or solid state disks and capacity. DDP versions are all listed in a table on our website: www.dynamicdrivepool.com. A rule of thumb is that for video or audio formats it is fine to use a standard 1 Gb ethernet infrastructure. For 2K or higher 10 Gb ethernet should be selected. Both 1 GbE and 10 GbE connections can be mixed on one DDP.

What backup systems can I use?
The mirrorDDP is not your basic backup solution because it makes a complete mirror of a production DDP and in that sense is more sophisticated. When a production DDP fails one can immediately continue to work on a mirror DDP. As for the standard backup or archive situations. Any tape or disk backup solution running on any computer with a connection to the DDP can be used. A few names? Atempo, Bru, Archiware or Retrospect.

What kind of maintenance tools does the DDP provide?
The Setting pages of the DDP's Graphical User Interface gives access to S.M.A.R.T. information as well as system and other parameters. As a preventive maintenance tools a Volume Check facility is built in. The raid cards have their own ethernet port. The raid card Gui or CLI interface allows further controls such as SNMP trap handling

How does a DDP screen looks like?
The DDP is optimized and tested with any combination of applications. The DDP supports any workflow planned. The Workflow Manager is perfect to control folder access rights.

What makes the DDP future proof?
1. Any DDP of 3U or higher is expandable in capacity and bandwidth 2. The hardware components are standard off-the-shelf thus future proof 3. The software is fully owned and continuously adapted and developed further 4. The company is owned by the developers, profitable with no external ties

Who uses the DDP?
The Dynamic Drive Pool is used in small boutiques with just two users, in mobiles, in use with rental companies, educational organizations and bigger post production companies and broadcaster. A few names are: NASA, CNN, CBS, Teletota, Besson, RTBF, Studio 100, Discovery, VPRO, RTL, ZDF, ORF, WDR, NDR, NowTV, NHK, Northumbria University, Arri, Cinelab, Viasat, DFFB.

What is the DDPs Workflow Manager?
With the release of the new optional Workflow Manager the Dynamic Drive Pool features another innovation. It has never been easier to set and maintain access rights. Read/write, read/write no delete, readonly, drop box and other rights can be set per desktop DDP drive, user or group on folder level with inheritance. It functions equally well in a heterogenous Windows. Mac and Linux environment. The Workflow Manager is typically developed for this industry with a non-IT user in mind. Applications with no inherent locking mechanism such as FCP, Pro Tools and Premiere benefit from this workflow manager. Users can be controlled by Active or Open Directory.

What happens when I replace a drive in the DDP?
Drives are hotswappable. When a new drive is installed with a higher capacity, capacity is still limited to the original ones because of the raid 5 configuration.

How can I recognize which drive to replace?
Which drive is broken can be observed by selecting the Raid monitoring program.

How do I add a second DDP to the first one?
By connecting the second DDP to the network, activating the DDP manager on the desktops and adding an IP-address.

What if I have less then 5 clients but I need much more capacity?
Talk to us about your requirement(s) so that we can advise you a usefull solution.

What if I want mirrored disk instead of raid 5 setup?
That is okay when it is known to the manufacturer when the system is ordered.

Can I resize a drive without loss of data?
Drives can be extended as is. Shrinking will be possible shortly.

Can I loose a drive or data?
The drives, which are used by the desktops, are virtual drives, which are protected by the underlying raid configuration. The main board and the pci cards are single but the computer memory is ECC memory. There is a limited possibility that wrong data is written due to a malfunctioning main board or pci card or because of an intermittent software failure. To further minimize that from happening optionally snapshots can be taken for each virtual drive separately.

What are snapshots?
Taking a snapshots means that the current disk status is frozen. New data can be written to the disk but it does not influence neither the data nor that part of the filesystem. Snapshots therefore give an extra layer of security on top of the data redundant raid system. The drawback is that the moment the snapshot is taken extra capacity is required for the disk of which the snapshot has been taken.

What do I have to buy for 25 desktops with a low bandwidth?
When your requirement does not fit the standard DDP offered please contact the manufacturer or dealer. A special offer can be discussed.

Where does the software reside?
The DDP software is well protected because it is part of the raid setup of your system.

What happens when a drive is full?
Exactly the same when any other drive which is internal in your computer is full.

Why would I buy a DDP instead of a fire wire drive?
For companies with a number of operators the advantages are obvious. Also for one person operations a number of advantages come to mind such as: higher capacities and bandwidths, longer cabling, better data protection, flexibility in creating, using, exhanging and sharing drives not to forget reliability.

Why would I buy the DDP instead of a file or NAS server?
When using a file or NAS server the bandwidth is severly limited due to the software overhead.

What is the technology behind the DDP?
Ardis Technologies as iSCSI experts developed AVFS, the Ardis Virtual File System. iSCSI with AVFS is the technology behind the DynamicDrivePool. iSCSI is just like FC a block IO technology. But because iSCSI exclusively uses Ethernet there is only one network infrastructure to consider; standard Ethernet with standard Ethernet switches. AVFS is the metadata controller responsible for managing accesses on the ethernet SAN providing simultaneous read and write access for everyone. So there it is: the DDP, a storage server which connects to standard Ethernet and providing high bandwidth project and file level based sharing. Some applications supported are from Avid, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk, Digital Vision, Grass Valley, Digidesign, Merging, Nuendo, Sequoia, Fairlight and others. All out of one box with sustained data rate 2-3 times higher then regular NAS systems.

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