Fibre Channel Dying?

[Walter Biscardi]

[Andrew Mac] “and I was wondering what the future of fibre channel is?”

If any of us knew that, we’d be playing in Vegas right now. It’s still a very viable format and if networking multiple systems is the need, then that is the way to go. Facilis and Ciprico are the top dogs in Fibre Channel right now with ProMax also having a very interesting solution.

[Andrew Mac] “Most of what I read on these boards is all SATA/SAS now and the new Dulce drives seem to be rather good.”

They are the rage right now and we just purchased two 8TB units from MaxxDigital that will run off the ATTO R380 card. I decided to go that route because it was much cheaper to do this rather than network our three suites together with Fibre. But Fibre was my first choice. We lose network functionality this way, but I was able to get a lot more storage for a lot less money.

We tested Sonnet, MaxxDigital and Dulce and they were all great. Dulce had the slowest speeds, but they build a RAID 5 array incredibly fast, about 15 minutes. The Maxx takes about 8 hours to build it the first time, but I liked the almost 500MB/s speed so I’m taking that unit.

It all depends on your needs. As far as I can tell, Fibre is going nowhere for at least the next 12 months and for networked workstations, there’s no substitute right now.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

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[Andrew Mac]

Thanks for the lightning response Walter!

Would it be possible to migrate our existing MediaVault 4210 into a network usage, say for storing commonly used footage, graphics etc.. Then purchase SATA raids as you did for local workstation storage, am I thinking about that correctly?

______________________________________

“I’m packing your extra pair of shoes, and your angry eyes, just in case.”

[Walter Biscardi]

[Andrew Mac] “Would it be possible to migrate our existing MediaVault 4210 into a network usage, say for storing commonly used footage, graphics etc.. Then purchase SATA raids as you did for local workstation storage, am I thinking about that correctly?”

That might work, however I would talk to both Atto and Ciprico about whether or not you can run Fibre and SAS/SATA on the same machine. We had zero issues running the Atto R380 in Slot 4 and a LaCie SATA card in Slot 1 on both of our machines.

But I don’t know how Fibre Channel will perform or if it will conflict with a SAS/SATA host.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’ve heard as of now, if you have two ATTO cards (such as a fibre and SAS) plus a Kona card, that you have to assign more lanes to the ATTO cards and take away from the KOna as the computer might tend to lock up with two ATTOs. I am doing some testing of a SAS raid myself and I transferred all contents from my fibre drive with two cards installed, but I used the PCIe Utility first, then switched it back to the KOna recommended when done and pulled out the fibre card.

I don’t think Fibre is dying, It’s an awesome technology. It’s just expensive. If you can afford it, it offers great scalability which SAS currently doesn’t, but SAS is much affordable and really really fast; so fast I didn’t believe it when I first set the RAID up. There’s your major tradeoffs.

Jeremy

[Chris Borjis]

Fibre isn’t dead yet, but when 10 gigabit ethernet becomes standard on a mac, you can bet fibre won’t be much use after that.

[Peter Wiggins]

Remember, iscsi is built into leopard so expect to be able to build cheap shared storage at GigE speeds soon.

Peter

[Alan Okey]

Fibre Channel isn’t going away, and here’s why:

Enterprise storage.

The number of Fibre Channel installations used by video post facilities pales in comparison to that of major IT installations for big businesses. Ask an enterprise IT manager if Fibre Channel is dead, and he’d laugh in your face.

The reason SATA/SAS options are so popular is for one reason only: price.

Fibre Channel is currently the only point-to-point storage connection protocol (non-IP based) that supports the use of fiber optic cable, which is a dealbreaker when you want your storage located more than a few meters away from your CPU.

Fibre Channel also isn’t standing still. 8Gbit Fibre Channel is currently in the process of being ratified. In short, you have nothing to worry about if you invest in Fibre Channel storage today.

Plenty of info here:

https://www.fibrechannel.org/

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Alan Okey] “The reason SATA/SAS options are so popular is for one reason only: price.”

not only that, they are now backed up with speed and reliability. I’m telling you, I was a SATA raid hater, for ever. No one could pry my icy grips off my precious fibre raid. But now I have this Sonnet and it’s great. Pulled a drive while playing back footage and it didn’t skip a beat. It’s connected to an ATTO card and they obviously know what they are doing.

SAS isn’t for a shared environment, but if you need direct attached storage for a great price and great reliability, there’s really no reason not to get it.

Jeremy

[Sean Oneil]

[Peter Wiggins] “Remember, iscsi is built into leopard so expect to be able to build cheap shared storage at GigE speeds soon.”

That may or may not be true.

In one of the older developer builds, the Disk Utility showed “Connect to iSCSI Disk” in the file menu. Since that build, it hasn’t been there AFAIK. It may end up being part of it. It may not. Or, maybe it will only be in OSX Leopard Server.

Apple also had ZFS filesystem in one of the Leopard builds, and that’s dissapeared as well.

SNS’s iSCSI initiator is now free, but it doesn’t always play nice with non-SNS targets.

[Sean Oneil]

I think Fiber Channel is absolutely dying. But it’s been a very slow death. If you already have it, I think you’ll be using it for a long time.

Not so sure comparing fiber to SATA/SAS is relavent. Comparing local disk solutions to SAN solutions is apples and oranges.

Back to fiber dying. It’s pretty obvious that everything is going toward IP-SAN. And iSCSI is clearly the most used now. The problem w/ iSCSI that most people don’t realize is what an incredible hog it can be on your CPU. Some 10gbe ethernet adapters have what’s called TCP Offload Engines which free your CPU from the tasks (none available w/ Mac drivers yet unfortunately). But right now these adapers cost a lot more than FC adapters.

I’m using an iSCSI SAN right now with 1gb adapters. I have two different ones. Both with their own problems. But when (and if) everything works right, I have 2gb for each client using dual gb connection. Not too shabby.

I know people using regular file sharing or a NAS server that supports Apple File Protocol (AFP). They use jumbo frames over gigabit ethernet and have no trouble working with anything that isn’t Uncompressed. With ProRes, this becomres even more attractive. On paper this is supposed to be a bad idea. The block-level access that iSCSI and Fiber provide are supposed to be all but necessary for this kind of work. But I’m not so sure anymore. Gigabit filesharing can be so fast it may not even matter. And a huge advantage is you don’t need an expensive cluster sharing program like Xsan/Metasan/SanMP.