Metasan or Sanamp or Stornxt…Advice please…

[Nathaniel Cooper]

For two windows workstations doing DPX workflows and color correction with the hardware that you have… I would definitely go with SANmp.

It’s very solid software, been around forever. SNS is a great company and you can download a trial version of the software.

The only downside with SANmp is that it is volume locking rather than file locking (both metasan and stornext are file locking) however for two workstations doing DPX that probably won’t be a big deal. However, MetaSAN and StorNext are both pretty set up and support heavy.

I did a shared storage white paper that covers the topic of volume locking vs file locking on pages 4 & 5, you can download it here:
https://Go.promax.com/SharedStorageWhitepaper

Hope this is helpful and good luck!

Nate Cooper
ProMAX
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.861.2725

[Matthew Crnich]

First and foremost you need to create a budget. The price for MetaSAN is vastly different than StorNext. I cannot comment on SANmp as I haven’t spec-ed it out for my infrastructure. MetaSAN and StorNext are both different approaches to a SAN fabric. One is purely software the other is software & hardware. The end result is the same but cost is a huge delta.

I am currently running MetaSAN. For 2-3 computers connecting to shared storage via block level locking, it is great. I have had great success using MetaSAN to connect 2 edit stations to a central piece of fiber storage. I have MetaSAN running on 5 computers, 2 Servers & 3 Workstations. The 5 computers are connected to 2 pieces of fiber storage, an EMC VNX 5100 & an Infortrend ESS16F-R1840-4. I have a Brocade EM320 Fiber switch. The workstations & servers are each running ATTO Celerity 82EN HBAs. Each computer is running OS X.

Now that we have grown, I am starting to evaluate StorNext along with other solutions. The price point for an entry in StorNext is easily 5 times higher. Based on our current needs and growth, StorNext is now a viable option, whereas 3 years ago it just was not.

I hope this helps. More than happy to answer any further questions.

-Matt

[Harcharan Singh]

Hi,
Thanks for your views.
At this point I have no budget constraints . So it will be great if you can let me know regarding stability of the systems we are discussing.
I will only be worried about the annual renewal costs of the softwares if any.
Thanks
Harcharan

[Dan Nethery]

Built a system 6 1/2 years ago with SanMP. Realized the limitations of the Volume Level Locking and the file system on the raid, and bailed to MetaSan.

MetaSan is great! About a dozen machines 4x Large infotrend arrays, with 10 xSreve Raids system running strong for the last 6. Only had one issue about 4 years ago and MetaSan remoted in and fixed it in about an hour and we have not had a problem sense. We have 0 IT staff in our building and still feel no need to hire one.

We deliver about 12 series year to 3 different networks.

Hope this helps!
dan.