Networking issue

[sumeetgupta]

Hi, we've been experiencing numerous issues with 3ds Max and Corona lately. We feel our network setup needs an urgent upgrade.

Below are the specifications and configuration of our network setup, along with a simple diagram.

We have approximately 40 workstations of varying specifications, all connected via 1Gbps Ethernet cables and two fully managed Cisco switches. Our data is stored in three NAS devices, each with 80TB of storage.

Huge exterior scenes with multiple proxies, etc., take forever to load, and are often accompanied by numerous crashes. DR also does not work correctly. Do you think we should upgrade it to 10 Gbps, or do you have any other suggestions?

Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks!

[clemens_at]

It seems you have a bottleneck from the switches to the NAS. How are those connected?

Also why are the NAS-devices daisy chained?

[sumeetgupta]

All workstations and NAS devices are connected directly to Cisco switches via Ethernet cables. Is there a better way to do it?

[clemens_at]

All workstations and NAS devices are connected directly to Cisco switches via Ethernet cables. Is there a better way to do it?

so each NAS is connected via one 1Gbps Ethernet cable to the switch?

[sumeetgupta]

That is correct!

[sumeetgupta]

All workstations and NAS devices are connected directly to Cisco switches via Ethernet cables. Is there a better way to do it?

so each NAS is connected via one 1Gbps Ethernet cable to the switch?

That is correct!

[clemens_at]

ok, well that is a problem then.

If all your 40 workstations try to access files on the 3 NAS devices at the same time, they all have to share this 3x1Gbps connection. So, things will be very slow.

With that amount of bandwidth, you should definitely look into a 10Gbps connection between NAS and switch.

Be aware that if you do this you will significantly increase the load on the NAS/Hard Disks - but since you have 3 of them them you should be ok.


As an intermediate step you can also set up a LAG(Link Aggregation).

Each of your NAS devices has 2 Ethernet Ports, if you connect each second port to the switch as well and configure it as a LAG in QTS you at least get double the bandwidth.

Also those NAS Ethernet ports are 2.5Gbps, so upgrading to a switch that supports that means you could potentially get 6x2.5 Gbps.

[sumeetgupta]

Thanks for your suggestion. That is indeed very helpful! I think the best course of action here will be to upgrade it to a 10 Gbps connection.

[sumeetgupta]

Hi again, I have a follow-up question.

I have prepared a revised diagram to upgrade the network to 10Gb for 21 workstations only, as they are new.

Here's the link to the switch which I am considering -
https://www.tp-link.com/in/business-networking/soho-switch-unmanaged/tl-sx1008/


Also, all of my NAS has Enterprise Hard Drive. Link:
https://www.primeabgb.com/online-price-reviews-india/western-digital-ultrastar-hgst-hc550-20tb-enterprise-hard-drive-wuh722020ale6l4-oem/

Do you think that might be an issue too, as the read/write speed of Hard disk is very low?

Should I also consider upgrading it to let's say 8TB SSD if multiple users are working on huge files and using DR etc ?
https://www.onlyssd.com/buy/crucial-4tb-t500-pcie-4-0-x4-m-2-internal-ssd-with-heatsink-ct4000t500ssd5/

Of course this will only be for the projects which we are in production and the rest of the projects can be stored in Enterprise Hard Disk for backup/archives.


Thanks again!

[clemens_at]

I would not recommend using 10GbE from the workstations to the switches. This is a huge hassle, expensive and it will not work as you intend it to.

You are not going to saturate those workstation <-> switch connections because you have the same problem as before by bottlenecking with only 3x 10GbE connections from switch to NAS.

I would stick with 1GbE for the workstations but make sure that they each get the full bandwidth.

To do this get a new switch, for example: https://www.omadanetworks.com/us/business-networking/omada-switch-access-plus/tl-sg3452x/v1/

This one has 4x 10GbE SFP+ uplink Ports, where you would connect the NAS devices to. Be sure to also get 10GbE SFP+ extension cards for the NAS.

As for the Hard Disks - how have you configured your Storage Pool inside QTS? Do you have some kind of RAID?

The TS-473A also has two M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD slots, where you could potentiality setup a super fast Storage Pool or use them for Caching/Qtier.

[sumeetgupta]

Your suggestions are invaluable, and I think I am getting there, having finally understood how it works.
I have created a revised diagram to ensure we are on the same page.

As per your question-

As for the Hard Disks - how have you configured your Storage Pool inside QTS? Do you have some kind of RAID
Yes, we have configured it as RAID for real-time backups.

Thanks again for your fantastic support!

[clemens_at]

The diagram looks good now.

Just to clarify:

If all 21 workstations try to access files on one NAS simultaneously, the 10GbE uplink will be saturated immediately and you will not get full 1GbE speed on the workstations.

The read speed of each NAS depends on the RAID type used. In a RAID-5 for example, the read speed scales with the number of disks, so with the 4 disks you mentioned, you would get around 900MB/sec (290MB/sec x3 - 1 disk for parity) 

I'm still not sure why you have 3 separate NAS devices but thats maybe an upgrade for the future.

happy to help!

[gagan.sachdev87]

Hi,

I work with Sumeet, and I’m writing in response to the question regarding our NAS RAID configuration.

All three of our NAS systems are configured in RAID-5 (please refer to the attached image – it's the same for all three).

Currently, we've organized the usage of our NAS systems as follows:

Two NAS units are allocated to different projects. Teams are assigned to one of these two NAS units based on their respective projects, which helps distribute the load.

The third NAS is dedicated solely to our model and texture asset library. We do not store project files on this NAS, although textures and maps are relinked from it during production.

Issue:
We're facing performance issues when working with large exterior scenes containing multiple proxies. These scenes take a long time to load and are prone to frequent crashes, even when only 5–6 people are accessing or rendering it from the same NAS simultaneously.

Would increasing the NAS RAM (currently 16 GB as shown in the attached image) help improve performance and speed?

[clemens_at]

Hello,

I made a mistake in the post before. In a RAID-5 all 4 disks are involved in reading so this should give you a theoretical read performance of around 1160MB/s which is a little bit less than what the 10GbE connection is capable of.

But these speeds are pretty unrealistic in a normal production environment where clients also write data. (RAID-5 is not very good with writes)

You could further optimize the performance, depending on the workload, by switching to a RAID-10. This would cost you the capacity of another disk though.

Its also important to note, that the speed of the RAID is now the limiting factor. You could only get faster client speeds if you had a bigger NAS with a bigger RAID or SSD's.

With the new network setup you should not have these issues anymore. 16GB of RAM are fine for this type of NAS. You can always check in Resource Monitor how much RAM is used.  Are you using QTS or QTS hero?

[gagan.sachdev87]

Hello,

Thank you so much for the detailed explanation and suggestions – really appreciate it!

We’re in the process of upgrading our network setup as recommended, and we’re hopeful it will help resolve the performance issues we’ve been experiencing.

To answer your question, we are using QTS. I also checked the Resource Monitor as you suggested, and you’re absolutely right — even with multiple users accessing the NAS simultaneously, around 30%–40% of the RAM remains free. It’s good to know that 16GB should be sufficient for our current NAS setup.

Thanks again for the insights and support!