Setup guide

If you expect to use Flare for very I/O-intensive tasks, it is recommended to design a storage and networking
solution accordingly. Regardless of the effectiveness of the Bandwidth Manager, the direct attached storage
of Creative Finishing applications (running either Stone FS or a standard filesystem) was not designed to
provide the functionality and performance of a high-end SAN storage device.
Configure bandwidth reservation
This section provides guidelines for configuring the standard filesystem Bandwidth Manager on the Flame
or Inferno workstation to have storage bandwidth adequately distributed between the local application and
the remote Flare workstations.
Stone and Wire provides a mechanism to reserve storage bandwidth for Creative Finishing applications and
tools that use a local mount point to a standard filesystem (DAS or SAN) as their media storage. This ensures
that the local application gets the bandwidth it requires and that real-time playback on the local system is
not jeopardized by requests from concurrent processes, including access from remote hosts such as Flare
workstations.
NOTE Bandwidth reservation policies apply only to I/O requests from Creative Finishing applications and tools.
They cannot protect your storage bandwidth from I/O requests coming from third-party processes or user
interactions. It is your responsibility to avoid using third-party tools with the frame storage. See Limit concurrent
usage (page 45).
Bandwidth requests are managed by the Stone and Wire Bandwidth Manager, based on the parameters in
the /usr/discreet/sw/cfg/sw_bwmgr.cfg configuration file.
When Stone and Wire starts up, the Bandwidth Manager automatically creates a [Device] section in the
configuration file for each partition declared in /usr/discreet/sw/cfg/stone+wire.cfg. The Manager sets
total theoretical read and write bandwidth values for each device, as well as the default reservation values.
Adding a New Device to the Bandwidth Manager
Use the instructions in this section if you want additional standard filesystem mount points (such as mount
points to SAN volumes or to any other standard filesystem volume that is not present in the
/usr/discreet/sw/cfg/stone+wire.cfg file) to be managed by the Bandwidth Manager. You may also use
these instructions as guidelines for understanding and editing the settings in the predefined [Device] sections
of the configuration file.
Each partition managed by the Bandwidth Manager must have a [Device] section associated to it in the
/usr/discreet/sw/cfg/sw_bwmgr.cfg file.
To add a new device to the Bandwidth Manager:
1 Open the /usr/discreet/sw/cfg/sw_bwmgr.cfg file in a text editor.
2 Add a new [Device] section at the end of the file, using the following syntax:
TIP You may also copy and paste an existing [Device] section, and change its parameters.
[Device<device_number>]
Path<path_number>=<device_mount_point>
TotalAvailableReadBandwidth=<total_read_bandwidth>
TotalAvailableWriteBandwidth=<total_write_bandwidth>
DefaultReservation=<default_reservation>
where:
■ <device_number> represents the number of the [Device] section, starting at 0. For example:
Install the Autodesk software | 71