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15-20Tb SAN suggestions
I’m looking for suggestions for a SAN setup to tie three Final Cut work stations to common storage drives. No heavy lifting, just standard ProRes HD files. Two current 12 core MacPros and an older G5 tower are in use currently. Right now we’re using a couple of 4Tb Buffalo Terastations that work fine, but I’m looking a little bigger, faster and possibly fibre connected although the Gigabit connections seem sufficient at this point.
Any suggestions that might work and won’t break the bank too badly?
Thanks in advance.E=MC2+/-2db
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9 Replies
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We’ve got the same sort of setup and are running a 16 TB EVO from SNS.
We’re using Gigabit Ethernet which is sufficient for us but made provision to go up if needed. One of their selling point actually as you can upgrade later.
It has been in operation 24/7 for the past two months without a glitch. This is not a very long time but we bought based on other people experience and the great service we got from them.
my 2 cents,
Patrice Freymond
Editor Certified Trainer FCP7/X
Post ConsultantAlways learning…
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Are you planning on sticking with FCP/Macs?
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Yes, for the near future anyway. The production workflow here is based on FCP at this point and won’t likely change soon. It works so we’re sticking with it for now.
E=MC2+/-2db
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[Tom Matthies] “Yes, for the near future anyway. The production workflow here is based on FCP at this point and won’t likely change soon. It works so we’re sticking with it for now.”
Well, you have a lot of options.
SNS is great.
We beta tested, then subsequently purchased a Sonnet VFibre system. It’s a fibre/ethernet based storage system strapped to a Windows 7 box (it’s an “all-in-one” 16 drive rack mount unit, CPU, storage and all). It uses metaSAN as the SAN software and the windows box is the metadata server.
The nice thing about metaSAN is that once it’s installed on all of your clients, your computers see the storage as HFS+, even though the actual drive connected to the Windows machine is formatted NTFS.
It’s been working great and we are very happy. It comes with 4 fibre ports (no need for a dedicated switch unless you need more ports) and you can also serve ethernet out of it as well. It has a 10Gb port which you can hook up to a 10 to 1 switch (10Gb in, then 10 ports of 1Gb out) depending on your needs.
It’s rather flexible, but that’s what we wanted as we have no idea what’s happening with our NLE future quite yet. We needed more storage capacity, a SAN seemed pretty necessary, and this system offered a lot of options from OSX to Windows to Linux, Avid to FCP to PPro. It is also expandable if we need more storage in the future.
Are you going to NAB? If so, there would be a great place to look at all the SAN options. There’s a lot of them.
Jeremy
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My experience with MetaSAN has been a little different.. With the small SAN they ar fine.. Anything with a lot of nodes and Volumes/Storage they fall down….
Absolutely horrific experience with a LARGE san…
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We only have one volume and only five clients at a time.
What happened?
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Metasan in my opinion is just capable of handling large SANs … Just not.. We have 2 dedicated metadata controllers and the system still falls down… Metadata controllers become unresponsive and then the volumes become corrupt.. It take 5-7 minutes to remove the volumes from the SAN definition each.. So 20 voolumes = 100 minutes plus JUST to remove the volume so that you can repair them….
Disaster….
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[Chris Lavin] “Metasan in my opinion is just capable of handling large SANs … Just not.. We have 2 dedicated metadata controllers and the system still falls down… Metadata controllers become unresponsive and then the volumes become corrupt.. It take 5-7 minutes to remove the volumes from the SAN definition each.. So 20 voolumes = 100 minutes plus JUST to remove the volume so that you can repair them….”
Ouch. Sorry to hear that.
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