acquired some gear

[Mark Raudonis]

The good news is that you scored a pile of free gear. The bad news is that your plan to put it to use is ill conceived and doomed to fail.

“Cobbling together” a video SAN is NOT just something that you can do with a pile of used parts. Perhaps someone like Mr. Z could do it, but it’s got to be the RIGHT parts. From your list, you’re attempting to create a cross platform SAN (PC and MAC) which is about the hardest thing you can ever attempt. You don’t mention whether you’re using Avid or FCP, but it does make a difference. AVID actually IS cross platform, and you may have a chance of making that work. FCP is MAC only, and just isn’t an option.

I’m not gonna waste the bandwidth to explain all the reasons why you’ll have a hard time. Suffice it to say, that IF you can get all the computers on your net talking to each other, that’s just the start of your problems.

I think your first instinct (sell all the gear) was the right one. Follow your gut… or spend the next few months rationalizing why you didn’t, as you troubleshoot yet another problem.

Mark

[Bob Zelin]

Ethan,
so you got a bunch of free gear. You have no money (zero money), and you want to build a working SAN. Is that about it ?

When I was 14, I wanted to be in a band. I grew up in a lower middle income community. My father made $14,000 a year as a NYC health inspector. Somehow, I had an organ. My friends, who were also not wealthy, also somehow got guitars, amps, drums, etc. Somehow, the money showed up.

You are not going to be a film maker, and editor, or a network engineer without some money behind you. If you have zero money, may I suggest that you get a job, and learn about this stuff. there are many wonderful inexpensive systems on the market, but they are not free. Just because you got a pile of gear for free does not mean you can build a working SAN. And if you can – well, good for you – I wish you all the luck in the world.

Bob Zelin

[Eric Hansen]

Mark: I’m not gonna waste the bandwidth to explain all the reasons why you’ll have a hard time

genius. i might have to make this my new sig.

to Ethan – one of the hardest things is creating a mixed OS environment for SAN. there are very few companies that have made this work and they charge you for it. the second hardest thing is if your dealing with video editing SAN over ethernet, you pretty much have to ditch all your old networking gear. i have thrown away quite a few $2k+ Cisco ethernet switches during my installs because they can’t do gigabit. yes they may have other enterprise features that initially made the $ worth it. but for fast SAN use, they don’t cut it. the clients are a little surprised to say the least, they thought they were buying for the future, but thats where it is today. just because you got a bunch of expensive networking gear for free (or cheap) doesn’t mean that it will work. i got a bunch of SCSI RAIDs and DLT decks that cost a small fortune only a few years ago, and still work great and exactly as they should, but they are not fast enough for todays needs. my 4 bay 250GB RAID-0 SCSI barely did 50MB/s (if i remember correctly), but we edited FEATURE FILMS on that thing.

don’t take any of these replies the wrong way. sometimes it can take guts to post questions to the SAN forum.

e

Eric Hansen, The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com