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Moving from ImageSAN to ???
We’re up against having to move to XSAN most likely. Problem – all of the new systems we want to add have Tiger pre-installed. Also, all of the new apps will be optimized for Tiger soon. So, we need our SAN management software to be compatible. Has anyone done an XSAN install? I’m wondering what a pain it’s going to be. We’ve been testing here and there with it. However, our IT department has been challenged to make anything work right to date. Do we have other options that I haven’t thought of? I know iSCSI has been around for a while and it seems to be picking up steam. Should we perhaps be looking into that route instead of putting more money into our current SAN fibre structure? We have six machine and we’re adding two to the mix soon. So we’re already at $8k just to get back to square one. We have plenty of storage: about 12TB (RAID-5 SATA arrays) via 2Gb fibre. Thoughts?
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3 Replies
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Be sure to check out the XSAN forums here on Creativecow and https://www.xsanity.com/ for more info dedicated to XSAN.
iSCSI isn’t going to be a good solution yet because there is no iSCSI initiator from Apple that can be downloaded for free.
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com makes iSANMP which will allow you to run a cross platform SAN based on iSCSI but I haven’t checked to see if a complete solution can be made with their product nor checked their pricing. Might want to give’em a look.
Keep in mind that it would be very difficult to obtain the speeds you might be seeing on Fibre with iSCSI because you are limited to line speed or require a Host Bus Adapter with iSCSI acceleration.
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You might want to check out Terrablock by Facilis Technology (facilistech.net). They run on 2 or 4Gb Fibre Channel and 6 clients can do dual-stream uncompressed SD (or 2 clients at 10bit uncompressed HD). Storage is from 2Tb to 19Tb. Plus, there is no charge for client licenses – just a add a FC card and you’re online. And with no ethernet metadata network needed, it almost administers itself.
We’re about to add another one here.
John McClary
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Jeff,
I really can recommend FibreJet, which is 10.4 compatible. The big benefit of it is that the drives act like regular local storage and installation and setup is extremely simple. They also have a demo version (I think for some $ since you need a demo dongle), but it is really worth the money.
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