Advice on a SAN

[Bob Zelin]

Brandon –
everyone is a big shot (“I have to have uncompressed 10 bit HD-SDI) until they find out how much it costs to do it. Then all of a sudden, everyone is going to compromise.

And you know what, even if you spend the money for a 6 seat fibre system that will do 10 bit HD-SDI uncompressed, that system (which will be the cheapest one you can find) will NEVER do 2K and will CERTAINLY never do 4K. Everyone wants the world, and wants to spend no money for it. Guys who do DV want to spend 100 bucks for shared storage. Guys who do ProRes422HQ want to spend $2000 for shared storage, and YOU are looking for a $20,000 turnkey solution for uncompressed HD. Well guess what – YOU CANT HAVE IT, and no, you can’t have it next year either. And when you finally say “ok, we will spend the 60 – 80 grand to do what we need” – this will NEVER do 6 seats of 2K or 4K.

Comprende ?

bob Zelin

[Steve Cox]

Hello Brandon my name is Steve Cox and like all these other folks so eager to advise you I work for a company who has been supporting and building SAN’s for a long time… CommandSoft’s engineering team goes back more than a decade. They wrote FibreJet the application that aspires to make SAN management as painless as possible. Everyone talks on here about how expensive fibre channel infra structure is and huge the savings are going to be with ethernet and iSCSI or some layered approach. They leave out the cost to your bottom line when you have to give up or compromise performance and you have to retool because the next generation of video that comes out needs more bandwidth and greater and greater speed. FibreJet is hardware agnostic and will work in all there various topologies… Fact of the matter is you can build a solid 16TB / 4Gb FC SAN with four seats for under 20k without even doing a lot of research that will handle 2k no problem… and for under 30k you can go to 8Gb FC 16TB and have 4 to 6 fully licensed seats with unlimited scalability… if you want to talk about what your road map for the future is give us a call… if we can’t help you we will refer you to someone who can… Bob Z is consistently right about one thing on here, if you want to get this right you need to speak to a professional… maybe way more than one…

Steve Cox
VP of Operations
CommandSoft, Inc.
610 Anacapa Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101

URL: http://www.commandsoft.com
Email: steve_cox@commandsoft.com
Tel: 805.730.7772
Fax: 805.730.7779

[Brandon Kraemer]

Bob,

No big shots here… just probing possibilities. You see, we do finish Uncompressed 10bit now, no need to change that. So if we want to deploy a SAN, then maybe that will have to be for offline workflow, or non-broadcast finishing and we use a DAS for the high-end work we currently do.

Not sure where you arrived at the $20k number, I never said that, and the lowest quoted system I have seen so far has been over $30k. I came here to get some expert advice, in specific terms, and your previous post provided some of what I am looking for. Beyond that I will defer to the vendors for specific cost and bandwidth scenarios for our workflow.

Good day.

[Jim Boas]

Brandon,
you may want to check out the New Galaxy Aurora LS RAID/SAN appliance Rorke Data released about 6months ago.
This 8Gbit Fibre RAID/SAN appliance is very cost effective (about $.70per GB) and allows you to connect up to 8workstations without the need for a fibre channel switch.
The Galaxy Aurora LS is a 18TB RAID system with Dual Quad Core CPU’s in it with a patent pending software RAID6 algorithm. Due to the fact that this system does not have a hardware RAID controller like many of your standard RAID systems (which typically is the bottleneck in performance and rebuild times), the Galaxy Aurora can get you anywhere from 800MB’s/sec to 1000MB’s/sec with up to 6 times faster rebuild times and alot more features then your standard RAID system.

Rorke Data also sells a number of SAN software packages including MetaSAN, StorNext or the Commandsoft Fibrejet software.
For your application, we would highly recommend the Fibrejet software due to it’s ease of use and rock solid performance. We have hundreds of SAN’s installed world-wide using all of the SAN software packages mentioned above.

A 3seat 8Gbit Fibre Galaxy AuroraLS 18TB SAN (using Fibrejet software) including all of your required 8Gbit Fibre cards, 10Meter Fibre cables and hardware and software support will cost approximately $25,000.

you can check out the Galaxy Aurora LS at – https://www.rorke.com/aurora.cfm

please don’t hesitate to call me if I cn help you in anyway.
610-793-7513