Finalcut setup with PC access?

[Morten]

Considering a setup with 2 Finalcut/Shake Macs connected to XRaid through Fibrechannel.
Is it possibles for PCs to mount the XRaid through ethernet for writing 3D renderfiles?
Will it affect the Macs that the PCs are mounting through their Fibrechannel bus?
Any suggestions for FC-switch?

– No Parking Production –

FCP 4.5, Dual G5, X-Raid

[Floh Peters]

How do you want to control access to the XServe RAID? One channel per system? XSan? FibreJet? Something else? Depending on which software you do use for managing your SAN there are different ways to access the data on the XServe RAID from remote stations. The network interface on the XServe RAID is for configuring the system only. You cannot access the drives through it.

[Bernard Lamborelle]

Morten,

While you can definitely create a regular mount share using Xsan to expose your storage to LAN clients, I do believe that Apple recommends you create this share on a metadata controller, as to not affect the performance of other users.

Tiger Technology promotes MetaSAN as an alternative to Xsan. One of the reason being that we offer a companion product called MetaLAN. MetaLAN enables many of the benefits of your SAN to expand to the LAN side. This includes higher throughput on the LAN (we use direct block access vs. slower network file protocols), we provide you with the ability to control bandwitdh that each LAN client gets (as oppose to free-for-all approach), and we provide you with the ability to connect Windows and Linux clients in addition to Mac. MetaSAN sells for $995 and MetaLAN for $295. Quite a good deal when you consider everything you gain!

Drop me an email or give me a call if you’d like to find out more.

Bernard Lamborelle
bernard at tiger-technology.com
http://www.tiger-technology.com
514-667-2015

[Morten]

Our plan is to use SNS or similar to access data on the SAN (XRaid) from the 2 Mac editing/compositing workstations, connected through a Fibrechannel switch. A render farm of PCs should be able to access the SAN through Gigabit Ethernet for writing 3D renderings (mostly during the night). We prefere to avoid a Metadata controller, and only run with the simple workstation setup…

– No Parking Production –

FCP 4.5, Dual G5, X-Raid