[Hmurchison]

Agree Michael the software management requirement of a SAN is somewhat stifling. I’ve made contact with Dataplow, they make a NAS/SAN hybrid software. Perhaps it will offer the best of both worlds. I’m checking out your products as well. Thanks.

[Hmurchison]

“Teaming” the Gigabit links does not result in an improvement in link speed but rather a wider pipe that can support more users without degrading as poorly as a single link. Sorry for the misinformation people. I evidently fell into the same misconception that many have.

[Hmurchison]

Be sure to check out the XSAN forums here on Creativecow and https://www.xsanity.com/ for more info dedicated to XSAN.

iSCSI isn’t going to be a good solution yet because there is no iSCSI initiator from Apple that can be downloaded for free.

https://www.studionetworksolutions.com makes iSANMP which will allow you to run a cross platform SAN based on iSCSI but I haven’t checked to see if a complete solution can be made with their product nor checked their pricing. Might want to give’em a look.

Keep in mind that it would be very difficult to obtain the speeds you might be seeing on Fibre with iSCSI because you are limited to line speed or require a Host Bus Adapter with iSCSI acceleration.

[Hmurchison]

I should have more info hopefully later on how to accomplish this.

[Hmurchison]

Richard here’s a couple choices. I’m no expert but iSCSI is seeing new vendors hop in every month it seems.

Storage- Overland REO 1000, REO 4000, Snap Appliance 4500, Falconstor
HBA- I like the Alacritech SES2000. You maintain all ethernet features yet still have the TOE iSCSI acceleration.
San software- Tough one. Still expensive trying to find out more about DataPlow

Other?- Stay tuned

[Hmurchison]

for my clients. With Gige networks becoming cheap to setup
and Fibre still being expensive I see a lot of people moving to
iSCSI and in many cases using hybrid setups where Database and Exchange servers are on FC while the rest of the network file sharing servers are iSCSI.

I’m now seeing the 1TB iSCSI RAID5 drives coming down to $3k and D-Link just announced their Xstorage (no pricing yet) but knowing D-Link it’ll be pretty damn cheap.

[Hmurchison]

iSCSI is encapsulating SCSI command protocals within ethernet. Thus you can attach storage anywhere on the network and still have block level access to that storage. Block level access allows you to retrieve the data you request by grabbing the datas blocks. In a NAS you’d have to send the request to the filesystem which would then transfer the block data…one more step that slows some tasks down. If I’m a bit rough on that description forgive me I’m trying to get my head around these technologies as well.

I’ve checked out the Datacore stuff and it seems pretty decent. Let us know what you think of the demo. I heard it’s easy to setup.

[Hmurchison]

I’m not sure but the problem is likely the supporting bridge chipset. Lacie needs to rapidly move toward incorporating SATA connections on most of their high performance lineup. FW has been nice but it makes more sense to connect directly to the controller.

[Hmurchison]

https://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/

[Hmurchison]

You’re killing me. I got a GD PC 🙁

😀 just kidding. i’m just jealous.