we are a pretty small company working mostly with compressed HD video,
so we do not really have the need for the high bandwidth of fibre
channel (nor have we the budged for it) - our AFP/SMB is fast enough.
Still, Xsan has a few things that make it quite interesting for us:
- spotlight support
- ACL support
- Time Machine support
- a working "network" trash (files are imediatelly deleted over AFP/
SMB, a pain)
- easy expansion of storage (storage pools)
- storage affinity
WIth this in mind, I started to build a poor mans test SAN:
- Openfiler 2.3 beta 2 as iSCSI storage server (open source)
- Studio Network Solutions globalSAN iSCSI client for OSX (freeware)
- one MacPro acting as Xsan client/controller connected to the iSCSI
LUNs
It turns out that the experiment works quite well, throughput is fine
(considering the cheap hardware I used as server) and I guess it could
further be improved with port trunking/link aggregade. WIth 10Gb
Ethernet such a setup might even please those needing high bandwidth.
Why is Apple selling Xsan as fibre channel only wherea StorNext is not
so restrictive?
Does anybody see any problem with such a setup - why isn't this
explored already?
And at last: I've used an ADC developer seed Xsan serial for the test
above, but I'd really like to expand the test and add the 3 other Macs
to the SAN. Is it possible to get Xsan evaluation serials?
Looking forward to your thoughts!
Best
mark
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