[John Jonathan]

Hey thanks Bob, the funniest thing is the most simple aspect, the math, was the hardest thing to wrap my head around. Have a drive that does X mb/s divide by streams, thats your bandwidth.

I will read though these emails carefully and figure out what kind of attack I can price out, and see how much money I save.

I think right now, my biggest confusion is 10GigE versus 8GB Fibre. It seems the cabling is very similar and 10GbE uses Fibre/Optical Cabling, but is backward compatible with all ethernet? So essentially you can go 10GigE piped down to 1GigE just by slowing the stream down, the packets move the same? So its better for some potential future proofing?

Also with any sort of SAN setup, FIBRE etc, you essentially you proprietary SAN software, or in the case of the Facilis Terrablock, its all built into the drive array. The array essentially has a bunch of drives, hardware (CPU,MEMORY), and software(SAN) to navigate traffic.

If I build something myself, I am just breaking up these components and since I am using basic network setup 10GbE over TCP/IP, the computers themselves are navigating the traffic and not a third party SAN software? Is having propietary SAN software station prefered? Could I just get a high end PC, put awesome SAN software on it, direct connect a Maxx Digital Evo 4K Expando, put a 10GbE Card or 8Gb fibre on it, and essentially save lots of money, and it would be similar to the Terrablock?

On the Mac side, a Mac with a Maxx Digital Array via direct connect(maybe a Evo 4K Expando), then a 10GbE, going to a few computers. Is it that we don’t need any SAN software? So I could do a MacPro computer, direct connect a MaxxDigital box, then put a 10GbE card on it, then connect it to a network? This setup would essentially work because it stays on the Mac network, its looks like mac, acts like a Mac but it is going to give me super fast drive stream speed.

Thanks So much, I think I am getting the hang of it. So 10GbE needs no extra software, but Fibre needs SAN software? Actually I am going to quit while I am ahead and do some more reading and wait for a reply.

Thanks ..

[John Jonathan]

Hey Matt, I don’t dought that, but do you have any schematics or diagrams that show network layouts with SmallTree products. Doing what I wanted to do?

Thanks.

[John Jonathan]

Hey Bob,

We want to have one HERO box, either a SMOKE for MAC, or a ASSIMILATE SCRATCH, both would max out at 2k DPX uncompressed. The FCP/AE stations would be PRORES or something similar.

I would imagine around 4 FCP/AE stations and 1 SMOKE or SCRATCH. We potentially would have other systems via ethernet, but we want to be able to cap their bandwidth so they can move stuff off an on the storage, but that movement wouldn’t mess up the HERO box’s sustained data rate.

I appreciate any suggestions..

-J