Thunderbolt Networking

[Walter Soyka]

[Craig Seeman] “I brought up this topic a long while back and I vaguely remember being shot down as it was just like Firewire. Maybe not though. Granted “choppy” but I can’t but think this is a harbinger of things to come. Personally I think it’ll be a direction small facilities will consider.”

I believe I contributed a bit of that “Ethernot” critique.

While I stand by what I said then — I still doubt we’ll see cheap Thunderbolt networking infrastructure — if Apple can make TB networking smoother, a Mac Pro serving a TB2 RAID over NFS as SAN Locations via its built-in TB ports will be the cheapest shared storage solution yet.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
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[Gary Huff]

[Craig Seeman] “I vaguely remember being shot down as it was just like Firewire. Maybe not though. Granted “choppy””

Yeah, just like FireWire.

[Craig Seeman]

I can’t help but think Apple is aiming for TB as Network. It’s not there yet and I certainly don’t know if it will be but I can’t help but think Apple is going to explore/pursue this.

[Gary Huff]

[Craig Seeman] “can’t help but think Apple is aiming for TB as Network.”

You do know that TB has limited bandwidth, right? Why would you want to run a network off of it AND a Pegasus RAID AND a monitor AND a hard drive or two AND a Red Dragon-X card via a PCIe expander?

Something’s gotta give.

[Marcus Moore]

It depends how many TB controllers you have in the machine. The MacPro has 6 thunderbolt ports on 3 controllers. So you have 3x 20GB/s in bandwidth to play with, not just one.

[Craig Seeman]

[Gary Huff] “You do know that TB has limited bandwidth, right?”

Which will keep growing. The solution may not be here today but it will be optical and much higher bandwidth down the road.

[Gary Huff] “Why would you want to run a network off of it AND a Pegasus RAID AND a monitor AND a hard drive or two AND a Red Dragon-X card via a PCIe expander? “

Why would you think one is limited to a single controller chip?

[Erik Lindahl]

For a small “cluster” of machines this could be a very potent solution – if it deems to be stable.

One “Main” MacPro could probably dedicate 1 TB controller for i/o and storage, 1 TB controller for monitors and 1 TB controller for two “render slaves”. The “slaves” would share 20 Gbit but still that should be close to them having direct access to a TB1 RAID.

Not for everyone but surely interesting for some! If it actually works in the long run… 🙂

[Gary Huff]

[Craig Seeman] “hy would you think one is limited to a single controller chip?”

I was thinking “laptop’-centrically.

[Marcus Moore]

It looks to me like the current MacBook Pro and iMac both have a single TB controller chip for both ports.

[Craig Seeman]

[Marcus Moore] “It looks to me like the current MacBook Pro and iMac both have a single TB controller chip for both ports.”

Slightly off topic, but it is nice to see the 13″ with two TB ports even if it’s a single controller. The MBPro has TB2 ports unlike the iMacs also.