David Gagne
Forum Replies Created
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For a little more I’d probably prefer Small-Tree Titanium Z-5 15TB. It’s only 5 disks so probably a little less performance. Could also go for their Z-8 which is a bit more money…
I’d prefer Small-Tree only because their support is top notch and so is the product.
I’m sure the OWC one is nice too, and would work great, I just prefer to use a company I have already had good experiences with.
Also it appears OWC’s warranty is not the same thing as “support” – they will repair or replace defects, but will not help you troubleshoot or any promise of SLA. It’s just a warranty on parts.
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Can we just sticky one of these posts from Bob? It seems everyone asks this question over and over, and then runs away when Bob answers.
It would be great if Bob just had the money laying around to lab and benchmark all these bad solutions out there to compare with the good ones.
I mean, you *can* do a file share out of a mac mini using an external disk and play back a single 1080 ProRes… but will it be reliable? What about when spotlight decides to reindex randomly? What if you try to connect more than 5 clients?
The point that Bob and others make is that if you’re charging money, you should be investing money so that you can CONTINUE to charge money. Clients don’t like it when you miss deadlines or worse, lose footage because you’re too cheap to back up.
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Lol Bob hates XSAN 🙂
On the other hand, he is right. Long term you probably don’t want to invest into that old architecture, or go with a StorNext architecture, unless you plan on scaling really large. It’s just not worth it.
What I’d do in your shoes is make the most of what you got short term, and plan on upgrading to a nice new NAS solution when you can.
Option 3 (short term solution):
Upgrade your Macs to 10.9 (after doing a backup) and the latest XSAN / SMB stack. Share the XSAN volume from one of the clients (or add a mini to do it), and mount that on the PCs. At least you all have SOME access to the same volume, although you’ll be limited by the network of the fileshare. You COULD even upgrade one of the mac pros to be a server with a 10gbE card and a switch… -
SNS is kind of the exception since they wrote their own initiator for mac, and are committed to the creative workflow.
Pretty much anyone else who mentions iScsi quickly starts talking about things like deduplication, compression, VDI, etc., All stuff that has nothing to do with media and is not worth paying for.
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You didn’t mention how many iMacs you have.
For $5k I’d say just forget true shared storage. You simply can’t do it justice.
If I were in your shoes and I had $5k to spend I’d first sell that mac pro so you have $5.2k to spend 🙂
Then I’d work on properly equipping each workstation with it’s own direct attach storage (Promise, Lacie, etc, RAID5). If you need to copy files around, you can share them amongst each other, but don’t try to work off each others drives.
If you have any money left over after getting that setup, I’d save it towards your future upgrade, which in my mind should FIRST be a large backup storage (not production). After you get that in place, THEN get some shared production storage.
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Bob any secrets you can share publicly here? I switched off NFS to SMB recently. Was working in 10.9 actually but 10.6 was randomly not mounting.
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But, but but… NIMBLE WILL BUY THEM LUNCH!
Seriously, from a media standpoint I hear “iscsi” and shudder.
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Kind of curious about the bad experiences with LaCie, but on the other hand it’s Bob so I’ll just take his word for it 🙂
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What you using these for and what are you connecting them to?
I wouldn’t mind having that NexSAN box for my XSan storage, but I would not consider it for branch office storage… Same goes for the HP (AVOID!).
Check out Small-Tree, or NexSAN NST series, or many other solutions for a nice NAS. Why are you going Fibre channel?