Need feedback from end users of XSan, FibreJet and SANmp

[Francois Stark]

Well, we’ve installed a SANMP system about two months ago. Had some teething problems but here’s the summary:

What differentiates the systems:
-SanMP needs no Metadata server like XSAN.
-XSan can not be used as audio drive for Pro Tools.
-Fibrejet can not work with PC’s – only os 9 and X.

So we decided on SanMP because we wanted to use our five seats like this: Four FCP systems and one PC, acting as a server for our graphics systems. After installing sanMP on the PC we found that the PC side had some disadvantages: It could not access our sanMP drives that we striped on the mac using apple disk utils. We wanted to use stripe sets to improve performance so that cancelled out most of the mac -> PC sharing we wanted. The Macopener that comes with sanMP is also limited to mounting 250GB GB NTFS volumes on the PC.

So we decided to move one of our 1.2TB Huge SCSI arrays from the FCP systems to the PC server and move the PC server’s SanMP seat to Pro Tools. Well, both these systems work pretty well right now. The graphics server serves very efficiently, while we have run Pro Tools sessions with uncompressed video streams from different sanMP volumes. It’s no use to have only one pro tools on a SAN, so we should be getting another seat for our second Pro Tools room soon.

The four FCP systems work fine. Each FCP system has a large sanMP volume it can write to, and it can read all the other systems’ volumes. We also have a permanent volume for re-used graphics etc and a spare volume.

In terms of hardware we settled on the ADTX array because of the redundancy of the controllers: each controller can take over full control of all drives and raid arrays in the box. We also bought it for a little less that a similarly configured apple XRaid array. We also bought a QLogic 5200 fibre switch and five apple fibre cards.

If you can, get a reseller that has experience in setting up SAN for FCP systems (chrispy seems to be a good candidate) but if you have a hard head like me and want to do it yourself, here are a few hints:

– Once you figured out how LU mapping and masking works, make sure every port on the drive array maps a LU 0 to the clients. I started with LU 1 and none of my clients wanted to see any LU’s.
– Our G4 systems did not want to see the LU’s properly on os X.3.9. We went back to os X.3.4 on the G4’s and then they worked fine.
– Don’t jump in to new OS updates without proper testing. Rather install the os you want to test in a firewire drive partition and then install client apps like FCP and SanMP. Test from the firewire drive, while leaving your production boot partition for real work. We should continue testing tiger this way soon – our preliminary tests on the G4’s indicate that tiger also does not allow the G4’s to see the LU’s properly. If you don’t see the LU’s, SanMP can not run because it needs to convert normal NTFS drives to sanMP drives.

In the end we could have used Fibrejet because we don’t have a PC on our SAN.

Regards
Francois

[Eric Filios]

wow, what a great post! thanks for sharing your experiences for the rest of us.

[James]

Francois,
thank you for sharing your experience. That was very valuable information on SANmp. I personally am a bit concerned about XSan’s capability to share files based on some feedback got from this forum as well as others.
I thought about SANmp due to the fact that it is volume sharing and can allow at least 2 users to access the same project in the same volume(am I right to say this?) and best of all allows Protools to access the volumes. However that is not a prerequisite.
Then I came across FibreJet which I thought was great since it supports Protools besides being a file sharing SAN solution. But I haven’t heard of anyone using it and hearing what they have to say about FibreJet’s performance and robustness. It’s inability to operate cross-platform doesn’t concern me though.
Once again thank you Francois, for sharing your experience.
Anyone else out there used FibreJet in their setup?

JL

[Francois Stark]

Fibrejet and SanMP are examples of volume based sharing. They only allow one user to write to one volume at one time, but all users can read from that volume at the same time.

EG you can digitise all media for a project to one volume and then four FCP suites can each run their own project using the same media from this one volume, OR you can digitise on three FCP suites to their three volumes concurrently, and edit the material on the fourth suite once the digitising is done.

SanMP’s project managment is a bit more complicated that on file-based sharing systems like XSAN where all users can write to all volumes, so in most cases you will just set up one very large volume where all users work.

Regards
Francois

[Floh Peters]

We

[Francois Stark]

Can you use Apple’s standard disk utility repair tools on a fibrejet volume?

[Floh Peters]

Yes, you can use Apple DiskUtility as well as DiskWarrior & Co on FibreJet volumes. This is one of the advantages of using a Apple standard filesystem.

[Bart Harrison]

[Francois Stark] “The Macopener that comes with sanMP is also limited to mounting 250GB GB NTFS volumes on the PC.”

Francois, you are using Macopener to access NTFS volumes ???

Bart

– – – – – – – – – – – – –
Bart Harrison
MPA – The HD Suite

America’s VAR
TurnKey Editing Systems, Storage Area Networks
HD Consulting, Production & Post, Exhibition & Distribution
http://www.hdsuite.com
954-894-1221

[John Mcclary]

If you’re considering SanMP, you really need to also consider Facilis Terrablock. It runs OSX and Windows, has NO client license fees, and almost administers itself (rare for a Fibre Channel system). With 2Gb and 4Gb clients, it is very fast. To speed up digitizing we use three clients at a time.

Cons: (1)volume based system so only one can write to a volume at a time. We keep our projects locally so we have few limitations from that and you can switch writing permission at any time. (2)creating a new volume can take about 2 minutes. We create our volumes with the original project so we have few problems. (3)the volumes seem to perform best with 1,500 to 1,800 files (limit is 2,000 per volume). We keep all our dissolves and titles on the local machine so again, no problems. Last, the system tops out at 19.6Gb capacity.

John McClary

[Christopher Tay]

John…do you mean to say it tops out at 19.6TB instead…coz 19.6GB is not alot nowadays.

So do you have a local array to keep your dissolves/titles or you’re just using the internal drives ?

-chrispy