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I'm walking around Boston. Why am I walking around Boston? It's not just to visit MIT. I'm here to visit Chef Nick. It's a very large YouTuber, but they're not a tech YouTuber. Nick is not super technical, but his channel has grown and he needs a lot of storage and cameras, and he's doing a lot of fun cooking adventures. It's a cooking channel. Now, keep in mind, Chef Nick is not a super nerd like we are. That's okay. Everybody still needs computers. Everybody still needs computers to help them get their job done better or help them have fun or help them build their giant cooking channel, whatever the case may be. But that's okay. I will help them because I am patient.
How's it going everyone? I'm Nick. I am a chef. I make lots and lots of food videos on YouTube. And I am here with Wendell because my server ran out of space. So, I'm pretty sure I called the right person, but Wendell, can you help me out? I'm just an internet rando. It's fine. Let's get it done. Yes, we I can help you out. But actually, 45 Drives is going to help you out, and it's going to be amazing. But first, 45 Drives, we need to take a look at it and see. 45 Drives makes a storage appliance, and I'm pretty sure you're going to need that, but I actually need to look at the rest of your infrastructure because I have a feeling that you're going to need more than just a server. So I talked to
them about their problems to find out more about it and it's like oh yeah storage we got this 45 drives and some drives from server part deals. 45 drives for the chassis and the expertise and putting everything together is an easy slam dunk win. So when I got there this is what we were facing. They're just using network attached hard drives without any real like plan or organization for backups and redundancy. Not really but there's a pile of USB SSDs. I mean I guess that works. While I was there they asked me to take a look at their camera setup. Now, they've got some fancy cameras that can stream NDI and do all that, but there wasn't really
any wireless infrastructure to speak of. Like, they set up one thing to try to get their cameras to work, but their cameras never really worked reliably over the network. So, I had to make another call and Ubiquiti answered that call because this is a giant YouTube channel and now this YouTube channel is going to be powered entirely by this motherload of Ubiquiti equipment. Not only did UniFi send everything we needed to fully rebuild the network at with dual 25 gig back halls for that Storinator server, but also a camera and security system and a door lock system. So huge thanks to UniFi for supplying that hardware. Of course, now the scope of the project has expanded somewhat from just, oh, let's
plug in a storage server and set up some storage policies to let's rethink how this entire company is doing their IT infrastructure. I mean, that's basically what it is, right? because it's not just access control, it's the router, it's the firewall, it's the network, it's also providing remote access to the editors. And so rethinking all of that, rethinking how things are shared on the network. I knew the store would have no problem saturating dual 25 gig, but I didn't realize their existing 10 gig network was severely underutilized. So is it like I right now I have one small egg carton and I have like six dozen eggs. Well, I've taken a look at your infrastructure and Noah has been showing me around and everything is
not fabulous. If it were a sule, I would have broken my teeth out. Oh, okay. Okay, cool. Your setup right now. You've grown organically. It's totally fine. You have basically network hard drives plugged in and everybody sort of works off of the network hard drive. You have some third party services to help you with editing. you've got distributed infrastructure. So 45 drives is a great uh solution for storage. Okay. And we want flash storage because of speed, but right now I don't know if you know, but AI is kind of taking over the universe and it's driving the prices up of everything that I've heard. Yeah. So we can't do a full flash server and meet the capacity that you need. We want to do like 400 terabytes, but we also want it to go fast.
Got it. So we want to do flash for speed and mechanical hard drives for storage. It's like a seven course meal. Perfect. Okay, that makes sense. So, what's where do we start? Well, we start with the storage server and we look at the storage server and we get that going. Cool. But then the next thing that we add the core thing, it's it's called an Ethernet switch. An Ethernet switch. Okay. So, you had 10 gig before. Yes. We're moving up to dual 25 gig. So, 50 gig total. Cool. So, that means that your Mac editing stations, all of them can be running simultaneously and not compete with each other too much.
Okay. Whereas before, if you had two editors hitting your storage at the same time, they're kind of fighting with one another. Yeah. I And I remember that being a constant issue. Too many cooks in the kitchen. Too He's getting it. Uh you'll also be happy to know that uh your cheese is not radioactive. What is this? That's a radioactive. It's a radiometer. You already tested my wheel of Parmesan cheese with this? Yeah. So part of the Wait, why would why do you have this?
Just for fun. Just for the LOLs. This is just for fun that you bring a radioactive tester in here. Yeah. If you want to think about what we're putting together for your network, it's like you have a couple of components here that are really nice. Like the super amazing cheese. It does taste delicious, by the way. They got me some. It is good. Uh but it would be like we're making spaghetti with that and then we got this parmesan on deck and it's going to be amazing. But the noodles we used were from the dollar store. Cool. So, we're going to fix that. Okay, cool. The good news is we're basically starting from nothing. And is that good?
Well, I mean, it makes it easy to take some actions that will help you grow. It could be worse, right? You're saying like in theory, I could have started from being brutally hacked and losing a bunch of stuff. And we're starting from right there. Yeah. I got my footage. Yeah. Nothing's messed up. Yeah. You're definitely in a spot where it's like there's only one copy of your data in some places. And if that one place uh goes away, then the data would go with it. I know. Yeah. I've lost footage before for sure. That would be bad. Yeah. There's this stack of SSDs that are just kind of hanging out. Like that's an archive strategy, maybe. I don't know.
I don't know. We're going to fix it. So, 45 Drives Storage. 45 Drives is a uh customizable platform. Okay. And they've got a lot of different options and they got the perfect option for you because it's going to have both flash and mechanical storage. Flash for speed, mechanical storage for capacity. You need both. So flash means speed, mechanical storage is just space. Yeah. Cool. And the reason we don't use all flash is just cost. And the cost has gone up 300%. Oh, you're kind of using like a hybrid of two things.
Y got it. Okay. So, it's like if I were trying to make a really fancy um cheese sauce, I could use a little bit of like uh I don't know, whatever. I could use a little bit of like some simple uh fontina and then I could use some very like expensive fancy graften cheddar, but I wouldn't want to go full cheddar cuz it just be too expensive. Are you saying that? Yeah. Basically, like it gets us the cheese sauce. Either way, it's going to be good and no one will know and no one will. Yeah.
The editing team will be happy. Nice. Okay, cool. Okay. Now, we also need, it turns out, stuff to plug that into networking infrastructure. And we also need manageability. But don't I have good Wi-Fi here already? No. Well, I So, why do I pay as much as I pay? I had them literally go through I saw them do it unless they just put up a wire on the street and brought it all the way through and drew drilled holes through this building. There are some upgrades planned for that. Okay, it's not quite there yet. When we started, ChefNick had basically nothing in the way of network infrastructure. But check this out. This is pure ubiquity. This is a pure UniFi network
stack. We've got a wall mount Unifi enclosure even. All right, so this is the NVR, the network video recorder for their security cameras, the whole nine yards. This is their enterprise fortress gateway that's going to do traffic analysis and help them see what's on their network on the wired and wireless side. They can have VLANs and a lot of complicated stuff that we love to get into. And then here's their power over Ethernet switch. Now, this is the 2 and 1 half 10 gigabit switch with the 10 gig back hall to the 25 GB switch that's in their top of rack where all their important equipment is. So, we got the big rack for the important stuff, the Mac workstations, editing, and our
Storinator because our Storinator would have been seriously bottlenecked. the 45 drives to be running at less than half the speed it was supposed to under their old setup. But with this new setup, it is the perfect setup for what they're trying to do. Okay. But so what exactly have I been paying for all this time? You've got an okay internet connection, but once it leaves the ISP's equipment, um it's a little bit challenging in this building. You need more access points. You've got some new cameras. Yeah. That can stream footage back directly to the server. And so this is a workflow thing. So if you have a wireless access point that can handle multiple streams at once because you have six cameras with high speed.
Yeah. Then you can uh have less work to do with offloading if you get that workflow going. You could have less work to do like it's a quicker turnaround for your editors to see the footage. They can see what's happening. And so UniFi is going to provide the access points and the 10 uh 10/25 GB networking backbone for that. Amazing. And your server supports dual 25 gig connections. Yes. So you can run that at up to 50 gig and all of your editing stations will be able to talk to the server at the full speed they're capable of.
Probably in about it could literally be in the next 30 minutes that we officially become the largest. We're we're right there. Definitely by the time this is out, you'll be right there. By the time this is out, we'll be the largest food and cooking platform on YouTube, which is really cool. And so because of that, you've got a little bit of growing pains and that's okay. Definitely. So this is like the boring corporate, you know, pinstripe suit version of IT infrastructure. Yeah. I mean, and even I will say I will admit like already from talking to you, some of it is not it's not it looks
really boring, but then you've showed me some of this equipment and it's actually really cool. We added some RGB. You added you even just you adding a red light makes it so much cooler, right? Is that what How do you do that with food? It's like you add food coloring to it cuz it's not like I don't know. I don't know that I like that though because it's like artificial dyes. Well, I think like it can be a mix of stuff. It's it's even little upgrades like heating the plate for someone when you bring it out to their table or and they feel it when they're there and they're like, "Oh, this is pretty cool." Like it could be the same
dish, but then all of a sudden the plates's nice and warm and it's all comforting and it keeps the food hot. That is a nice detail. Yeah. Stuff like that. Or even just like if you're serving something raw and you put ice under it, like that's a visual and a you know, a feeling that's really, you know, it's funny you say that because we have baked in little details like that. We did custom icons for the drives. One of them has a knife and the other one has a pizza. Your guy worked that out, but I was able to glue it together technologically. That's great. That's awesome. I love it. So, I come from the background of
Sonology QAP and an unrade server from back in the day. And the biggest thing has been the Houston Guey and we were able to create snapshots. We were able to set up protocols and it's been pretty streamlined so far. It's different. It's a different It's a different layout. It's different from Synology and QAP and Unrade for sure. And there's a lot of learning to do, but it seems very robust and it seems like it's giving us the control. It's giving us the access that we need and it's giving us insights which is great because we didn't have a lot of we didn't really know what was happening with the old systems. So we've now hit a point where the server is no longer the bottleneck. It's actually
just the Mac devices. Mac devices come with 10 gig Ethernet ports and that's now the bottleneck. So we'll be able to run all of our Macs at 10 gigs and fully saturate them to some degree without stressing the server too bad. The biggest surprise that I'm finding is actually the UniFi dashboard. It is clean, streamlined, and it is incredibly well integrated. The ecosystem that UniFi has created has allowed for just really quick overview stuff, but you can really dive into the details of specific avenues and specific things you want to learn about. It's been just such a breath of fresh air seeing a properly managed, properly setup network. We had a ton of devices on this network. We
still have a ton of devices on this network and adding all of these things. I was pretty worried about adding so many devices onto the network, but it's just add adopt. You plug it in, it shows up, UniFi tells you, hey, add this thing. You do, and it works every single time where it has so far. We have a lot to go. We have a lot more cameras to set up. Um, but so far it's been just a totally streamlined process, which thank I'm so thankful for because adding all these devices manually, entering IP addresses, doing it the oldfashioned way would have taken forever. So, at my old studio, I mean, obviously we keep this place very secret, but at my old studio, I would have uh families in minivans
pulling up all the time out front. Like I have a distinct memory of being in the kitchen and I'm cooking and I saw like the lights of a minivan kind of pass through the kitchen cuz I like to use natural light and I go out and it's a it's just a full family that gets out of their minivan and they're all standing there like a family photo almost like the mom, the dad, the all three kids and I remember just looking at the parents and sh I'm always so nice like when I meet people I'm always so nice and I was filming that video and I just remember looking at the two of them and just shaking my head and I pressed the thing and the shade slowly went down my windows. I
remember that so distinctly. But that's like that's the moment where I was like I got to get out of here. I already had like seven security cameras by that time. But yeah, security is becoming extremely important. I do have a bit of a problem with Randos myself, so I can't imagine at your scale. Like part of it's great because it's like well they're the ones that allow us to do this stuff on YouTube and that's what keeps you going. But then the other side of it is there's just tiny moments. That's all I asked for. Like tiny little moments of life where you just want to be.
My favorite is the unsolicited hug. that. Totally ruins my plan. Yeah. Like I enjoy meeting people because actually being face to face, you're all of a sudden like you all of a sudden can get um well not you can get to know the the person that's enjoying your stuff and it allows you to have that connection and understand who you're making this stuff for, but there's moments where it's tough. So yeah, security huge part of everything protecting the actual footage itself because it's very important that we keep it. I mean, we're we have a lot of footage now. And there's some shoots where I don't know, we're using 20 plus cameras now. Yeah. And so, uh, that's a lot of footage for one video. It's insane. Like, I
mean, we'll download single memory cards that are full of 900 gigs on them, you know? So, it's like we need to protect the actual we need to protect the uh we need to protect the footage from the kind of cyber security standpoint and we need to protect the actual location, don't we? Yeah. the platform is the beginnings of the exact same architecture that major broadcast houses use, at least the ones that are fully digital. The security platform that Ubiquiti has is great. You've got uh doorbell cameras, uh door strike plates. Um it ties in with your regular security system and you also have security cameras and all of it is super easy to manage, super easy to deploy. It has AI features, so
it's like, "Oh, there's an animal here. Oh, there's a person. Oh, I recognize this person." Face recognition. All right. And it's not cloud-based, so you're not uploading all of your footage into the cloud to be hacked. It's all stored. So, 45 drives, storage is in place. Editor should be happy. It'll be really good. Then the thing that really will make that 45 server sing, not just the drives, server part deals. Thanks, server part deals. Y we've also got the ubiquity network. The ubiquity network is going to be the backbone of not just your editors and your editing stations. Yeah. Also, your wireless cameras for future workflows and your security system. Yep. And your cameras that go with your security system.
Okay. And all of that. And then this is your security monitoring logging appliance which is, you know, this can stream offsite so that you got another replica somewhere else. So your security system is sending all of this elsewhere if you want. Yeah. You just got to set up another one of these and that and the cameras and 360 motion and door locks and all that. So I think this will carry you into the next phase and help you uh maintain and uh exceed the number one thing. So, you feel very strongly now that I'm in a spot where I can film as much as I want. Yep. I can in theory have as many editors working right now as I want.
Yep. And definitely a lot better off than you were. Not worry about getting hacked and to the or that's separate. Yeah. Well, getting hacked is that's different. Well, I mean, you have the infrastructure now for monitoring. Okay. And control that you didn't have before. Okay. Which it's up to you to use it. Okay. I see. I've given you a pony. It requires carrot feeding. I got it. Sweet. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. I think there's only one way to thank you, which is with an unsolicited hug.
Thank you. Appreciate it. Seriously. It's fun. And you taught me a lot. So, thank you. No. Yeah. Anytime. Yeah. And next time we should cook. I like it. Yeah, that's fine. I uh I When you say that's fine, you mean you uh I like overnight oats. The only cook that I know is Alton Brown, and he was the only like he was he provided instruction in a way that I understood. Overnight oats are not for me, but we'll make we you know we'll make a sule. Okay. How's that? One that won't break my teeth.
Exactly. Yeah. Thank you so much. Seriously, really fun. And you It's amazing how much you know about all this stuff. It's really cool. It's fun. It's what I do. And I appreciate you jumping in and helping us with this before it became a real problem. Yeah. Usually I'm on the other side of this, which is also why I call myself a computer janitor because it's like something bad happens and then they're like, "Oh, we need to call that guy." So I appreciate you calling before it became a four alarm fire.
Yeah, I mean I have a great team to thank for that. But yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. I that will be the last unsolicited hug that I do. So although if I see you on the street, I am going to give you another one. Oh no, you don't don't encourage them. Yeah. So it's been a little bit since Wendell left us and we have been busy in our serv closet. If we take a check at what we actually have built, we have our display. We have all of our Mac minis and Mac Studios. Here we have our 45 server. And we actually decided that we wanted to upgrade. So we ordered 18 more hard drives that are all running on a separate VDEV from the original one. So now we have four discs of failure
prevention, redundancy, whatever you want to call it. Down in the bottom here, we have our old Synology servers. We have some UPS's. So, it's looking pretty good. We actually just wired in electrical specific for the server itself. And just to make sure that we don't trip it, we built in a couple different redundant their own breaker power supplies. If we go ahead, sorry it's a little bit loud in here. If we go ahead and take the side off here, you can see that the server actually has a pretty good amount of space. So, we have three UPS's hidden in the back here. All of it's being brought up to our UniFi 25 gig switch and all of that's being routed down to all of our computers here. So, the server has been deployed. The
editors are editing off of it and it has been fantastic. We are no longer bottlenecked by our network. We're not bottlenecked by the server actually being able to write fast enough for the editing that we're doing. And we're not worried about shooting in higher res and shooting with more cameras and shooting even more things because we have the storage and we have the space to actually do that. Coming over to our security rack. This is all ubiquity. So we have our Ubiquiti NVR Pro. We have our uh Enterprise Fortress Gateway. And then we finally have our USW Pro Max. And Ubiquiti being Ubiquiti has decided that's not enough for these guys. So, they're actually going to send us
over their 25 gig switch to fully kit out the network. The studio's internet and the studio networking is about to be lightning fast, and we are super excited. So, thank you again, Ubiquiti. You have supercharged the studio, and we cannot wait to get all this installed and up and running, even more so than it already is. On the bottom here, we have a security feed, which I will probably have to blur out um just from our main studio. And that's all hooked up into our modem here. So, what used to be a closet off of one of our rooms in the studio has now turned into our full-fledged server room. We have air control, we have redundant power, we have a crazy fast network that all of
our editors are able to utilize off of local machines. We have a giant server that's which has absolutely been fantastic. We don't have to worry about constantly running out of space on the server and moving it off onto SSDs and it's all one place now. And we even have some flash inside the server which has been absolutely fantastic to work on. We are off to the races. The editors are editing. We're making great food content. Thank you to everybody who has helped us along the way. From Dev Mount to making cool little mounting brackets that allows us to hang stuff inside the server rack a little bit easier.
Ubiquity, you absolutely knocked it out of the park. We have more capabilities and insight and control over our network than we ever have. We actually have a proper IT department now because of you. Thank you 45 Drives for being a constant support, hooking us up with an amazing chassis. This thing has been absolutely stellar. We haven't run into any bottlenecks now. The editors are happier, which is that's big. And also, thank you to Server Part Deals for actually supplying the drives and the discs to make all this happen. So, and to leave it off, thank you, Wendell. You were fantastic. Your expertise is next level, and Chef Nick will forever be grateful for making the production
house that much faster. So, thanks again,
