[Steve Higdon]

Current MSRP on SANmp is about $500 per seat.

[Steve Higdon]

[Andrew Richards] “SANmp is used for fibre channel storage area networks (SAN). SANmp manages volume locking so that multiple users of the same fibre channel RAID do not stomp on each others storage transactions. One user can read and write, everyone else can only read any given volume. You would not use it for Ethernet-based network-attached storage (NAS) like Final Share or Small Tree, which use protocols like AFP, SMB, or NFS to connect.”

I’d like to set the record straight on SANmp, as Andrew’s comments are not entirely correct.

SANmp is a SAN volume management software that can be used to manage not only Fibre Channel storage, but also iSCSI volumes. That’s two different connectivity modes, both of which are block level. Fibre Channel can provide very high performance over optical cable. iSCSI can typically provide about 100MB/s over gigabit ethernet, and significantly higher speeds over 10GbE.

Andrew IS correct when he points out that SANmp is not required to manage NAS protocol volumes such as AFP, SMB, and NFS.