[Peter Shawn]

Has anybody of you experience / knowledge of OpenFiler? It’s a opensource Software – wonder if that could work out.. Maybe I find time to try today!

[Peter Shawn]

Thanks a lot for your answers. It made me understand the set of issues a bit more.

Unfortunately we cannot afford buying a FC-Switch because as I saw they start at a few thousand Euros. Or is there a FC-Switch which is affordable and would fit my needs?

I still wonder what could be done with the Longshine Fibre-Channel-to-Ethernet Switches – are they completely superfluent since there must be a Server which reshares the Volumes? Or would it be possible to have 2x Mac Workstations connected directly over FC to the SAN + the mini-GBIC-to-Eth-Switch where the rest of the Network could access the Volumes?

I cannot say how many other PCs need to have access to the Storage but I guess it would not exceed 3-4.

As I understand from the SANmp Webpage I’d have to buy a license for each Client for about 999€ – is that correct? So maybe there would a FC-Switch be cheaper + I’d be capable of having a file- not volumebased Storage which would be a great advantage, wouldn’t it?

Cheers,

Peter