[Shane Sokolosky]

I have always had more favoritism towards SANs, realistically the only difference between a SAN and a NAS is the way the storage is accessed. NAS = behind a server, Network attached Storage, SAN = Everyone direct attached to the storage, Storage Area Network. Hence SAN will always be faster since there is no middle man and you can take full advantage of the raw speed of the storage.

it’s interesting though with new technologies emerging, we’ll see all type of storage (SAS, SCSI, Firewire, USB, etc.) being used as SAN volumes, and using 10Gb Ethernet pipes. FCoE (fibre Channel over Ethernet) is going to make this possible and considerably lower the cost of storage and allowing us to use alternatives to fiber channel storage.

If we are going to be able to use the same cheap SAS and other direct attached storage as were using today in these NAS environments then why put a server in the middle?

Shane Sokolosky
Manager of integration Services
ProMax Systems
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[Shane Sokolosky]

There is also Easy find that will search SAN volumes as a substitute if spotlight isn’t working.

https://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

Looks like a problem with the WWPN. What kind of fiber equipment are you using? HBA and Switch?

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

To sell the more expensive model of course.

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

I still think it’s less expensive and less complicated to go with fibre, although your initial investment was not fiber, but you could get a 4Gb fibre RAID for the same amount you paid for the Cal Digit.

The only components that you’d need after that to have a 3 seat SAN would be :

3 Seats of MetaSAN
3 Apple HBA’s (copper cables included)
and a Qlogic SANbox 1400 switch

and only costs

about $6,800

From a tech perspective 10Gb E is cool and high tech, but from Bob’s perspective I don’t see ethernet being any easier. this is a REAL solution for you if you REALLY wanted to do what you originally were trying for with 3 people editing HD. I also bet if you wrote an instruction manual on how to install this stuff it’s be shorter than Bob’s tutorial here on the cow.

If we don’t want to put 7k towards a solution to take full advantage of a HDCAM SR Deck and 3 editing stations then we might want to rethink a strategy altogether.

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

What you and Sean are setting up is called a NAS system, meaning Network attached storage.

Not a SAN.

The difference being that in a NAS you have your storage behind a server, where your server is doing the sharing. In a SAN your storage is directly attached to all your clients, hence the reason for SAN management software.

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

[Bob Zelin] “Belden and all the others want 10G ethernet (10GX) to succeed, and obsolete fibre.
It will happen, and probably soon. Running copper cable is very appealing to every industry – not just ours.”

10Gb Ethernet is still going to use fiber optical cables if you want to go any kind of distance with it.[Bob Zelin]
I could say you could run fibre over copper also same difference.

“Sean is correct. 8 7200 RPM SATA drives with a modern SAS/SATA Raid controller are doing just over 600Mb/sec, so 16 drives – forgetaboutit”

Yea the drives are pretty fast, I think that’s an overestimate (maybe a burst rate of a RAID 0 / JBOD, but sustained I agree it should be plenty fast enough. Don’t know what I was sayin, late night maybe?
(as a side note, a box that get’s 600MB/s only gets 180MB/s even with a 10Gb pipe in a sharing environment isn’t that fast, some poeple ask why fibre channel? well this is the answer).

So I think the confusion sets in when talking about connections and different types of networks. The term “Fibre” can be used to reference a cable and a type of network protocol. The term “Ethernet” can also be loosely to describe both as well.

If we start with the storage and look at how it works and why it’s fast, it communicates with the machine it’s directly attached to via SCSI commands.

If we look at “Fiber” referring to the Fibre Channel Protocol which transports SCSI commands, it makes sense that your going to get the most out of your storage in a network like this with the greatest of ease and most likely all the bandwidth your storage has to over, so if we see Sean’s drives as capable of doing what he wants then this would be the way to go, no overhead and simple.

If we look at “Ethernet” referring to the TCP/IP Protocol which was made to communicate with packets which can be received out of order, then why would you want your SCSI commands from your storage to go this translation and ask for the highest amount of speed? There are otehr file sharing protocol that we were talking about such as AFP, SMB, etc. these are based on the TCP/IP Protocol with modifications.

It doesn’t make sense why you would want to make a SAN even more complicated than it should be.

The argument over connection types are invalid, as you can setup TCP/IP over fiber and also you can use iSCSI over ethernet, hence the fibre protocol over ethernet, and the “ethernet” protocol over fibre.

Both are standards devised by different groups for different reasons.

So I guess I could careless which kind of cable is being used, but I would care about which protocol is being used, especially in a case where I’m trying to eek out as much performance as I can from the storage. If I didn’t care about performance then why get fast storage that’s not going to be taken advantage of, kind of like Sean’s storage it’s plenty fast to capture that one stream of 4:4:4 uncompressed (220MB/s) but it can do 600Mb/s! according to the spec?

Fiber Channel FTW!

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

Well if the drives are fast enough, 10Gb Ethernet is not the bottle neck.

Editshare can do it. I dont see why your saying 180MB/s is the max throughput for 10Gb Etherenet.

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

It’s good to see people providing solutions like this for the smaller setups, some places really have the need to share and don’t need a super high bandwidth SAN like you said. Way to go guys!

P.S. You guys ever try to do this same thing without metaLAN? It’s possible with just a server (Mac or PC)… I’m sure, so what are the benefits of having MetaLAN compared to just a server with NFS, SMB, or even AFP running? Have you guys had a chance to test it both ways?
(I once setup a 4 seat NAS for editing HDV, 2 ethernet ports truncated from the server (OS X server, Tiger at the time) to a netgear switch and one cable to each of the 4 stations, each station got 40MB/s, enough to edit HDV all day long and that using AFP on OS X server (which is probably slower than the alternatives).

I haven’t had much time to see what difference MetaLAN makes, any ideas?

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv

[Shane Sokolosky]

Hey Sean,

10Gb is like crazy fast, your CalDigit RAID card and 16 regular SATA disks set up for RAID-5 couldn’t deliver even half the speed that you can fit down a 10Gb pipe (which I think that’s what Bob Zelin was referring to about 180Mb/sec maybe more but..), to really take advantage of 10Gb you’d need some serious storage, what your asking about above (Could one editor be capturing an HDCam SR tape while 2-3 others are editing uncompressed video without a hitch?) can easily be obtained by 4Gb Fibre Channel at a fraction of the cost of 10Gb. The only time I could see that you might want to dabble in 10Gb or infiniband (10Gbps on copper wire and 30Gbps switches) is if you were trying to like setup a RAW 4K SAN with multiple editors or like 2k stereoscopic video for real time 3D editing on the fly with more than one user or something like that. Even 8Gb fiber is becoming more and more popular and soon you’ll have more 8Gb Fibre RAID Controllers choices out there.

So What your talking about above would require more than the 16 SATA Drives,

You also mentioned that “I’m just hoping that 10gb is so much extra bandwidth I won’t have any of the same issues I had with 1gb.”

If you tried to use “Gigabit Ethernet” and some kind of Internet Protocol (IP) based file sharing service such as SMB, Apple File Sharing (AFP), or something like that then there’s no way to pull off HD like your talking about (If your looking at some of Bob Zelin’s solutions with gigabit ethernet, then sharing is possible but not at that bandwidth that you’d need.)

If you actually tried 1Gb fiber channel or Ethernet cables using iSCSI (both SCSI Protocols) you’d of probably came closer but still not quite enough unless you trunk the ports (and by trunk I mean probably 3).

Technically….
(Could one editor be capturing an HDCam SR tape while 2-3 others are editing uncompressed video without a hitch?)

If your talking about 3 people editing HDCAM SR then..
To do something like this you would need a SAN that could do about 720MB/s sustained and that would be cutting it low, realistically you’d want to more so I’d rate it at 800MB/s to be somewhat on the safe side meaning more reliable (Differences in storage manufactures makes a world of difference here).

If your talking about One person capturing HDCAM SR (I’d estimate @ true dual link 240MB/s) and 2 people editing SD uncompressed (25 Mb/s each) (which I doubt but I just want to point out the formula) Then you would need a SAN that could handle about 300MB/s

So first of all..the combined total bandwidth of the storage should be able to do the speeds listed above

Second of all.. they should be fibre channel because when your sharing storage a fibre fabric can easily handle this.

Hope this helps and isn’t to crazy confusing. 😉

BTW last time I checked on 10Gb pricing an 8 port 10Gb switch was about the same price as 2 x 16TB 4Gb Fibre Channel RAIDs (25k+)
*update after just checking it now (IBM) it’s down to 1 x 16TB 4Gb Fiber channel RAID.

Shane Sokolosky

Consultant / Systems Engineer

XSAN for Video Apple Certified Technician
Apple Consultants Network – Storage Area Networks
Apple Developer Connection

SANtech.TV
Office: 714-639-3767
Mobile: 714-599-1611

shanesky@santech.tv
https://www.SANtech.tv