Need feedback from end users of XSan, FibreJet and SANmp

[John Mcclary]

Sorry – yes, 19.6 Terrabytes. We just use local drive(s) for dissolves and any effects that won’t be shared. It keeps the volumes cleaner. We run the Terrablock with offline suites at the moment so single drives are fast enough. We are adding the Online suite plus five more offline rooms later this month.

John McClary

[Francois Stark]

Hi Bart

Sorry for the late reply – the question was hidden down here.

[Bart Harrison] “Francois, you are using Macopener to access NTFS volumes ???”

I see I made a mistake – macopener is needed to open HFS+ volumes on a PC, and the one shipping with sanMP is limited to 250GB.

Still waiting for ADTX / Apple to sort out tiger. Yesterday I accidentally figured out that even booting into tiger with the ADTX connected, without mounting any LU’s or even installing SANMP causes the other SANMP clients to go weird. Tiger must be writing stuff to the ADTX box which causes this, so for now I’m stuck on Panther.

Regards
Francois

[The_chinese]

I have much Experience with SANmp and XSAN…. If you’re doing audio, SANmp hands down. XSAN will not read a PT session, and PT will not even see the XSAN volume. A SANmp Fibre based system is great, but even the iSCSI systems are impressive as well. i installed one into our facility in Thailand, and it gets over 100+ tracks off of a drive with no issues. XSAN does have some cool features for the video side, but all in all I like SNS’s stuff better. Also, their Customer Service is absolutely the best in the business. no $199 tech support calls!!! It’s not that XSAN is a bad system, because I actually think it’s pretty cool, but SNS is just without peer.

My.02

-Todd A.

-Todd A.

[Michael Gossen]

Wait, you can see a XSAN volume from a Pro Tools bay as well as a PC too…

In an FCP enviornment, you can easily AFP/SMB mount from those clients (or better a seperate server). You don’t need anything more than DV really to mix, which you should easily be able to pull over ethernet. Same goes for PC, unless you are editing/GFX at full resolution. But you can see you at least have access. Not over fibre, but fast enough to mix for sure…

To me, XSAN is the best for multiple FCP users. The only drawback in my mind is the 2GB/s XRAID Fibre limit. That limits online a little, unless you want to have many XRAIDS. Otherwise, I would also tend to recommend Facilis’ Terrablock. Like SanMP without all the management…

Best of luck.

Michael Gossen
Helium Digital Media