Setup guide

■ Separate your media and metadata partitions. The worst contributors to fragmentation on a media storage
device are the files used to store metadata. These include clip libraries, setup files, and databases. It is
recommended to keep all metadata on a separate partition.
NOTE You may keep the audio data on the same partition as the frames. This has no significant impact on
performance or filesystem fragmentation.
■ Use the defragmentation tools provided by your filesystem vendor on a regular basis.
NOTE Defragmentation tools are often unable to realign files based on their locality of reference. Therefore,
it is advisable to reinitialise your partition periodically, by archiving your projects, formatting the partition, and
restoring the archives.
Limit concurrent usage
A filesystem performs best when only one process is accessing it. In some workflows this is not always
possible, which leads to a temporary decrease in performance. Furthermore, mixing read and write operations
can have a detrimental effect on throughput.
Autodesk strongly advises against allowing any third-party application to access the storage at the same time
as your Creative Finishing applications. The I/O operations from such applications may drastically decrease
the bandwidth available to your Creative Finishing application and also contribute to filesystem fragmentation.
NOTE Unlike direct attached storage (DAS), a Storage Area Network (SAN) is typically designed to handle concurrent
usage and will perform better under such situations.
Configure bandwidth reservation
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.
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 65).
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.
Advanced Configuration and Troubleshooting | 65