[Doug Mote]

Hi Jordan thanks for your thoughts.

Currently we have four FC7 edit bays on 2.2 gig 8 core Mac Pros with 8 gigs of RAM connected to the SAN by 2 gig Fiber Channel with a redundant FC back up. The arrays are comprised of 2 Rorke galaxy chassis and three Apple XSAN array chassis. Total storage is approximately 40Tbs

In addition to the edit bays the array also serves our two Xserve playout servers and two Xserve ingest servers. The Open Directory server is indeed handling permissions. Everything in the network is hard IP coded, we get DNS for outside services (Internet) from our corporate DNS server.

I wish XSAN was functioning just fine, it is anything but. Whether its forgetting permissions or falsely reporting FC connectivity problems or dropping authentication to clients on the MDC servers. Its just not happy!

Since XSAN is built on StoreNext code I was planning to move to the original file system and return the edit bays to local admin status so permission issues should go away entirely.

The Compellent solution being proposed would give me a separate drive pool with shared controllers between Production’s drive pool and IT’s drive pool. My pool would connect all FC and IT would be going iSCSI to their pool.

The Compellent system has a slick storage management schema and it would make off site backup a no brainer, expensive but easy. I could even run StoreNext on top of Compellent but that seems silly.

They are promissing 650 Mbits/sec bandwidth but with all my clients having a fixed 100mbit/sec pipe and there currently being 8 of them if I put the throttle all the way to the stops I’ll go screaming past the 650 mark. And there is the possibility of adding additional playout/ingest servers since this solution would free up my two MDC servers and the Open Directory server to be re-tasked.

Rodger that on your dropped frame comment, that has been my experience too. Maybe not that they don’t care but that they don’t understand why we are pushing so much data constantly.

Thanks again for your input!