[Bob Herzan]

Eric,

You have plenty to choose from in this area, from the Rorke side we would like to know a bit more on what your customer requirements are now and where they plan to go. Rorke has a large product line to offer you and your customers including most of the vendors mentioned in your post (Atto, JMR, AIC, 3Ware, Adaptec, Promise and 145 other storage related lines) our sales and technical staff are available to help you sort through the various options and put something together that meets both performance requirements and your customers budgets. We have a complete interoperability lab in place and run multiple seats of FCP, Adobe, Avid, AJA, Matrox, Bluefish, Protools, Blackmagic and more. We have some lower end NAS products that may be perfect for your customer however with out more information I’m not sure which product line to direct you to. Feel free to get in contact with me and we can talk about it in more detail.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300

[Bob Herzan]

It all comes down to workflow and your budget on how best to protect your SAN. You can add a low cost NAS with RAID protection onto your network and push the data manualy, LTO4 with the appropriate cards and backup software is also a good way of doing it exspecialy if you want to keep your backup’s off site or need to share them with your clients. I tried to add a quick image to this response so hopefully it will show up. If not you can contact me and I will send you over some additional detail and can hook up up with some of our customers in your area that are doing this already.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300

[Bob Herzan]

Prasad,

Anything is possible however I would not suggest it, the amount of money you may save by doing this most likely will be spent in personal time along with down time. There is much more to building a RAID then mounting the drives into the chassis. Drive compatibility to the RAID card for one along with having the correct firmware for the drive you choose. You also need to take into consideration things Rotational Vibration, ESD and potential shock vibration when integrating the drives. In addition to all of this not all raids are set up and optimized for video use and in many case’s warranty issues may also arise.

Bottom line is there are several types of RAID out in the market and I would suggest talking with several Raid suppliers to determine what the best set up for your application would be. Rorke has been around the block for 24 years supply storage to this industry, we have several types of RAID products that can be used as direct attached or incorporated into Storage Area Networks.

Let me know if you have any other questions and will be happy to help.

Bob Herzan
Vice President of Sales
Rorke Data Inc
952-829-0300