[Jeff Yana]

While I suppose you could use Nimble storage for media storage, it’s probably overkill. Nimble is an awesome product, but its really designed for small block, IO-intensive applications that can benefit from flash acceleration, such as databases and virtualization environments.

Its not unusual for monolithic IT policies to overshadow common sense solutions to highly specialized applications and problems, mostly out of pure ignorance, but sometimes pure politics, hurting productivity, users and sowing division along the way. I have been on both sides of the fence so I can speak from experience.

Maybe your IT admin should make a the habit of reading these forums to get a better understanding of the challenges facing his “other” users, those that don’t live inside of MS Office. Short of that, take it to his superiors and the CTO/CEO if necessary

Jeff Yana

[Jeff Yana]

Hi Valentin-

I think that you are going to have to better define your requirements. Are you in need of a SAN or a NAS? I ask because they are both very different and serve two completely different functions. With the hardware list & drive count you posted, I am afraid that it is not going to take you very far. For what you are trying to do, it all comes down to LUNs and wide-striping. Don’t confuse bandwidth with caching as caching mainly helps with non-sequential workloads, which will probably only constitute a small part of your requirements.

Also, Windows makes a pretty bad file server for a whole host of reasons. If you have to use Windows (and you don’t), then don’t use their server product, use their storage gateway solution instead. Personally, I would not use either.

BTW, it looks like we are both RTT alum., but I don’t think we ever met. I have only made it out to the Munich office twice.

Cheers.

Jeff