[Dave Mackey]

Hi Bob, sorry for the delay in responding, got caught up in a few urgent projects regarding other systems! I found your email via your website and have sent you a message which includes both my email and phone. I’d really value your insights!

Thanks,
Dave

[Dave Mackey]

Hi Bob,

The system we have currently is a Rorke Galaxy HDX-4 I believe (16x 2 TB SATA 7200 RPM drives).

There are four machines connected to it:

1x Mac Mini Server – For NAS functionality.
3x Mac Workstations – For post-production video editing.

Each of these machines uses a fiber channel direction directly to the SAN (it has four or five ports available directly on the SAN). The SAN can also support iSCSI, but this hasn’t been configured.

All other individuals needing simple file access via the LAN through the Mac Mini Server.

All four machines connected via fiber channel run FibreJet to manage access.

The post-production editing is done in a mixture of Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro I believe.

I have significant experience in using large NAS storage devices (setup for HA) but this is my first time working with a SAN (always found ways to accomplish the same much less expensively with NAS) – the SAN has been here for a few years.

My goal is three-fold, (1) to move away from FibreJet (licensing is expensive, software is not that great), (2) to eventually implement a new storage solution (whether NAS or SAN or hybrid has not yet been determined) and (3) make sure that the video guys have the best workflow available to them (e.g., locking an entire drive whenever someone is editing some file on it really isn’t ideal!).

That is a lot more background than you asked for, but I hope it helps explain a little more where I’m coming from. Any suggestions/direction you can offer would be greatly appreciated!

[Dave Mackey]

Thanks!

So most people these days aren’t using Fibre Channel at all with the newer systems? Using iSCSI?

[Dave Mackey]

Hi Ruth,

Based on your response I think using one of the big cloud providers is probably overkill for what you are looking to do. Dropbox, iDrive, and Sync should all be capable of what you are looking to do.

Dave

[Dave Mackey]

Hi Richard,

I’m not sure this is what you actually want to do. I would suggest plugging the USB drive directly into the workstation and then share the drive on your network so your other computer can connect. (Are you familiar with folder sharing in Windows/Mac?)

But if you did want to do it this way, I think you’d need an intermediary device that would then be connected to your two computers. This could be a USB bridge of sorts, you would connect your USB device to the bridge, then the bridge would connect via USB to your two computers…

[Dave Mackey]

Bob,

I could be totally wrong, but I don’t think Ruth was asking if she could edit in the cloud. She notes bringing down the files for editing on external drives or an “out of cloud” option using a centralized (and I assume) on-site server.

Ruth,

What sort of volume are you looking at?

AWS, Google, and Microsoft are the big three I know of. Have you checked out Microsoft’s Azure? Might be an option.

That said, it doesn’t sound like this is an instantaneous service nor that it is something you plan to scale to millions of clients? If so, you might be fine with something like Dropbox, iDrive, or Microsoft OneDrive.

Dave