I’m a game developer in AAA but I’ve been doing some stuff at home too. For a while I’ve just set up a free server with Amazon’s AWS EC2 running Perforce. But can’t really get big assets in there, and I really would prefer to have the server locally, more freedom and flexibility to handle it, etc.
I’ve been thinking of doing a home server for this, where I can ideally set it up, stuff it with a few multi-TB hard drives and call it a day. I admit I don’t know a ton about these kind of set-ups, and I wouldn’t want to have to fiddle with a very very complex solution.
I was really tempted to look at something like Synology’s DS920+ or something along those lines. But I haven’t seen much about them, and looks like getting a perforce server to run on them is not super-straightforward.
What would be your recommendation? Is it worth me looking for a NAS like the DS series, should I go full custom-pc for this kind of stuff? In general, any idea on how to best do this is really appreciated
Thanks a lot for your time If there’s any questions that’ll help explain what I’m after let me know!
I hope all is going well for you all! Cheers from the Scotland!
Cheers to you from Czechia!, The big question from the start should be - enterprise solutions are not easy to run without involving your current provider. Have you approach them or the department about it?
I have trouble discovering what Perforce is doing for you. Their gaming section talks about version control and project tracking. Neither of them are very demanding tasks and could be handled by NAS.
NAS serve a specific need and Synology does offer great user experience. Especially to people who want something from the cloud services hosted at home.
For example with version control could speed up local commits and handle uploads to AWS while you are not waiting for it. This is under the assumption that is what Perforce does for you.
but if the version control also provides test builds - well power of a NAS is limited.
Custom PC saves either money or provides more power for your purpose. so the answer is never simple.
I am afraid I cannot be much help - first time seeing Perfoce used with Game development.
I’m not looking for any particularly complex enterprise solution, for my home needs (not for any work related to my employer) I could do with a local at-home server and go from there.
For me case Perforce is used purely for version control, I don’t exploit many of the things it’s able to do, but for version control both for code and assets it’s my favourite choice at the moment. Most common interactions are going to be submitting, reverting and shelving different versions of some asset or code file.
I don’t think the power of the NAS should be a problem, since as you point out, I’m mostly going to just be doing local commits there. I’m wondering whether that’s good hardware for the money to get. And would be cool to know if setting up perforce on Synology hardware has any complications for reasons I don’t yet know
Any Synology will work, you might want to spring a little extra cash for the Intel versions and 4 drives. Both offer luxury, one easier compatibility for binaries and VMs, the other to use SSD and NAS drives for extra performance. IMAP, GIT and others can often benefit from SSDs on Synology.
Eitherway, Exos drives are now really cheap, so that would by my choice for data.