iSCSI Vs Fiber chanel

[Sean Oneil]

[Nick Franco] “i’m expanding my business and i’m really happy wih the sata raid array i have but when we are working on a large project and i have several editors working with me it’s inconvienant transfering and doubling up on files etc (this might just be my bad house keeping). but i feel it will increase productivity

i was looking at an xsans fiber chanel storage (NOT CHEAP), but resntly i’ve been made aware of ISCSI will this provide the speed and metadata handling i need for HD Uncompressed (and at some point 2 and 4k) (i do unnderstand that the more drives you have the faster the raid)

i just wondererd if anyone has experience of either?”

I thought this out a great deal myself and went iSCSI. I’m using dual gigabit. The way it works is you don’t get 2gbps of bandwith. You get two streams of 1gbps bandwidth. Hope that makes sense. Anyway, 1gbps isn’t quite enough for uncompressed 1080 HD. It’s almost enough, but not quite. Even if it was enough, you really want it to be a lot more than enough to have a good experience.

For me, I don’t do any offline editing in uncompressed so its not an issue.

If you NEED a SAN right now, and you NEED a mission critical solution that can take a beating, support uncompressed, and have good support, you probably want a fiber channel solution from Apple or one of the other major players in that market. It’s mature, and there is a large userbase to lean on.

But… it sounds to me like you don’t absolutely need it right away. It’d be great to have, it’ll speed things up, but you’re not going to turn away any work because of the time lost by not having one.

If that’s the case case, consider this. Fiber Channel is on the path to becoming obsolete. 10Gb ethernet is out now. And sometime within a year, 10,000 Base T will be ratified. That means very cheap 10Gb devices that work over regular Cat cable (even Cat5e at short distances).

My strong opinion is that you wait it out. In fact, just waiting till this fall might really pay off. By then you’ll probably find a very inexpensive 10gbe iSCSI solution. You can actually do 10gbe iSCSI now, but it’s certainly not cheaper than fiber. But it will be soon. Way cheaper. Plus Leopard will be out, and it is supposed to include Apple’s own iSCSI initiator built into Disk Utility.

Sean

[Nick Franco]

Thanks sean

that make a lot of sence. at the moment i’m onlining 10801 25 with a sata raid array so that will do. it’s going to be an interesting year.

Thanks again

Nick