Re: Xsan: Best practices for admin and backup

Dave,

I agree with everything you've said EXCEPT your comments about AFP Resharing. Contrary to your experience, we've been successfully using AFP to reshare volumes for over five years now. In fact, this feature was one of the primary motives for us switching from Avid Unity. Here's how it works for us.

The secret to successful AFP sharing is LIMITED BANDWIDTH. We work in a classic "off-line to on-line" workflow, so most of our clients (editors) are using the "Off-line RT" codec. This is an extremely compressed image that runs at approx 1/10th the bandwidth of SD DV video. Therefore, we can have 20- 30 people ALL using AFP to tap into the volume and still not bog down either the X-SAN or our ethernet switch. We also use a couple of dedicated X-Serves attached as fibre clients to facilitate this sharing. With three X-SANs under our roof feeding almost a hundred users, I can tell you that AFP works for us. You need to set it up properly, and understand it's limitations.

Can you reshare uncompressed HD over ethernet? No. Will it work for multiple streams of off-line RT or maybe even DV? Yes, absolutely. Just because this limitation may not suit your workflow, doesn't mean it's not perfect for someone else... like ME!

The people connected via AFP are NOT heavy users. They're story department, music department, producers, etc. They're primarily viewing media or doing "stringouts", not intricate layered editing.
That kind of "light use" works quite well.

In conclusion, don't beat up on AFP because it's not as capable as a fibre connection. Look at AFP as an extra "bonus" capability that X-SAN can provide that many other SAN's cannot.

Mark