[Matthew Crnich]

First and foremost you need to create a budget. The price for MetaSAN is vastly different than StorNext. I cannot comment on SANmp as I haven’t spec-ed it out for my infrastructure. MetaSAN and StorNext are both different approaches to a SAN fabric. One is purely software the other is software & hardware. The end result is the same but cost is a huge delta.

I am currently running MetaSAN. For 2-3 computers connecting to shared storage via block level locking, it is great. I have had great success using MetaSAN to connect 2 edit stations to a central piece of fiber storage. I have MetaSAN running on 5 computers, 2 Servers & 3 Workstations. The 5 computers are connected to 2 pieces of fiber storage, an EMC VNX 5100 & an Infortrend ESS16F-R1840-4. I have a Brocade EM320 Fiber switch. The workstations & servers are each running ATTO Celerity 82EN HBAs. Each computer is running OS X.

Now that we have grown, I am starting to evaluate StorNext along with other solutions. The price point for an entry in StorNext is easily 5 times higher. Based on our current needs and growth, StorNext is now a viable option, whereas 3 years ago it just was not.

I hope this helps. More than happy to answer any further questions.

-Matt