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FCmeter Plus


Apple Video SAN Performance Acceleration and Streaming Management


Looking for a cost-effective way to boost the streaming performance of your Apple video workgroup? Then consider FCmeter Plus, a hardware-software bundle that boosts the streaming capacity of your workgroup through the addition of high-performance FCmeter Fibre Channel interface cards and Vmeter QoS management software. Simply install the FCmeter interface card and software on your MacPro workstations, specify your streaming priorities, and you'll raise the streaming capacity of your workgroup by 50-100 percent.

Concurrent I/O-intensive operations like playout or post-production of HD video often push shared SAN storage to its limits. As these limits are approached, operations like playout and ingest become problematic as frame drops interrupt streaming performance with increasing frequency. While adding RAID is a common way to solve this problem, it's both expensive and unnecessary.

Simple, Cost-Effective Performance Solution


The FCmeter Plus combination offers a simple, cost-effective path to upgrade workgroup performance. Together, FCmeter's high-performance, 8Gbit interface cards raise I/O bandwidth while Vmeter QoS management software ensures streaming operations like ingest and playout get the bandwidth they need by pacing the completion of less demanding tasks. Installed on SAN-attached clients, Vmeter software raises the overall performance of Apple SANs by controlling the I/O access rates of attached workstations. The result: FCmeter Plus increases I/O bandwidth and raises total streaming capacity at a fraction of the cost for a RAID-based performance upgrade.

FCmeter Plus Features


The FCmeter Plus bundle consists of the FCmeter 8Gbit/second, quad-port interface card, driver, and Vmeter SQM management software.

  • FCmeter's 8Gbit, PCIe-to-FC interface card raises aggregate streaming capacity to 6.4GB/second - enough for 40 uncompressed HD video streams simultaneously.

  • Vmeter SQM software:

    • Eliminates frame drops due to unexpected I/O bursts.
    • Dynamically limits workstation I/O demands according to preset levels.
    • Increases effective SAN bandwidth and the number of clients that can be supported by a given SAN/RAID configuration.
    • Provides diagnostic logging and enables easy SAN troubleshooting and tuning.
  • FCmeter Plus installs on SAN-attached Mac OS X clients.

Downloads

FCmeter Plus installation software package download: