Expansion RAIDs – favorites

[Bob Zelin]

there are only a handful of companies making expansion chassis.
These include AIC, Maxx Digital, Proavio, JMR, Sonnet, and Xtratex.
At this point, I don’t know why all the drive companies don’t put SAS/SATA expander ports on the back of their drive chassis (it’s just a small circuit board in a normal SATA drive enclosure), but they don’t.

It’s up to you what you decide to use. (AIC is what AVID uses).

Bob Zelin

[Eric Hansen]

hey bob

thanks for the list of manufacturers. i’m amazed at how inexpensive the AIC products are, especially the 16 bay XJ1100 unit for only $1500. with 1TB Saturn drives and ATTO R380 card, its less than $5000. unless i’m overlooking something. its also interesting to see how different the prices are for different companies. a similar setup from Sonnet is over $10k.

e

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

[Bob Herzan]

Eric,

You have plenty to choose from in this area, from the Rorke side we would like to know a bit more on what your customer requirements are now and where they plan to go. Rorke has a large product line to offer you and your customers including most of the vendors mentioned in your post (Atto, JMR, AIC, 3Ware, Adaptec, Promise and 145 other storage related lines) our sales and technical staff are available to help you sort through the various options and put something together that meets both performance requirements and your customers budgets. We have a complete interoperability lab in place and run multiple seats of FCP, Adobe, Avid, AJA, Matrox, Bluefish, Protools, Blackmagic and more. We have some lower end NAS products that may be perfect for your customer however with out more information I’m not sure which product line to direct you to. Feel free to get in contact with me and we can talk about it in more detail.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300

[Bob Zelin]

Sonnet uses the JMR chassis, which is FANTASTIC ! The AIC is what AVID uses. AIC was a pain in the ass at the beginning, because AVID promised them all this business, but as we have now seen, no one is spending $22,000 (not a typo) for an AVID VideoRAID SR, which is the 16 bay AIC chassis and the ATTO R380 card. So now, AIC is hungry.

In the last 6 months, I have only put in either Maxx Digital or JMR chassis, which are both great. The ATTO R380 is the way to go.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Sonnet uses the JMR chassis, which is FANTASTIC ! The AIC is what AVID uses. AIC was a pain in the ass at the beginning, because AVID promised them all this business, but as we have now seen, no one is spending $22,000 (not a typo) for an AVID VideoRAID SR, which is the 16 bay AIC chassis and the ATTO R380 card. So now, AIC is hungry.

In the last 6 months, I have only put in either Maxx Digital or JMR chassis, which are both great. The ATTO R380 is the way to go.

Bob Zelin

[Eric Hansen]

Bob Herzan wrote – “You have plenty to choose from in this area, from the Rorke side we would like to know a bit more on what your customer requirements are now and where they plan to go.”

No worries. They want 3 things: Expansion, Expansion, Expansion. The first Ethernet-based SAN that I installed was based on the CalDigit RAID card and HD Element combo because the client liked the idea of buying small (just 4 internal drives) and being able to expand by adding more HD Elements. the funny thing is that the max you can go with this setup is roughly 20TB at RAID-5. they never thought they would need that much space.

until the following week. they are now talking expanding to 60TB. i always joked in my Xsan installations that it never mattered how much total space you have, you’ll only have 500GB free. editors and producers always find a way to fill it. 2TB or 200. so expansion is key. that’s why i’m specifically asking about SAS expansion RAIDs. one of my biggest hang-ups with Xsan was that if you wanted to add more clients or more RAIDs, you had to make sure you have enough ports left on your switch. because if you need a new switch, then you’re possibly doubling the cost of the expansion. with SAS cards like the ATTO R380 and RAIDs with built-in expanders, these hang-ups go away.

e

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

[Eric Hansen]

hey bob

are you using the JMR Bluestor SASS-JS?

thanks

e

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