Re: 2 Promise E-Class enougth for 6 HD Streams?

Berenger,

It could be enough, (Ill let one of these other experts on the Promise VTRAK chime in and let you know their own take), however, in general it's hard to say without being an expert on all the pieces in your configuration. One thing is for sure though, this quote you have has a very high price tag on it for just 5 clients!

***Disclaimer: I think XSAN is a great Apple Product! I do believe though, for some people, perhaps like yourself, forking over the money for the equipment, and then redundancy, and then meta data hardware you need just to make it all work right in a Fibre Channel environment, is not cost effective. Traditionally Fibre Channel SAN's were the answer, and everyone agreed on it, because it was what the answer was. However, nowadays, Gigabit and 10Gb Ethernet are now a viable, and very reliable infrastructure you can also consider, if you know someone who knows how to make it all work correctly. (it's Ethernet, but you still need to know how to install the network, and the pieces to make it all work right..)

Something to think about ---

For your HD Uncompressed editing to work really well, you could simply use locally attached storage and skip doing this with Fiber Channel all together, simply by setting up a Gigabit or 10Gb Ethernet environment for the editors to work on Central Shared Storage, in Real Time.

On a Gigabit Ethernet wire on a Mac (90MB/sec), you can move 2 streams of Pro Res HQ very nicely at one time (Actually around 60-70MB/sec)....

On a 10Gb Ethernet wire on a Mac (200MB/sec +)
This will even improve in the future with Fibre Channel over Ethernet coming in the next few years....

The idea in a nutshell is this -- if you direct attach the right kind of storage (big bandwidth pipes (MB/s), fast enough (how fast can it talk etc..)to your Apple Server, as long as your editors, don't need to access the same project file at the same time, then you won't need any overlying software to play traffic cop (FCP has file level locking built in).

You can implement this all running AFP (Apple File Protocol) out to the Gigabit or 10Gb clients connected to the network to support video editing in real time off the server.

This all equals = Your FCP editors editing together, sharing storage, in real time.

Keep us all posted...

Matt G