Re: HS San

[Chris Miller] "There may be a change in plans. We found a partial turnkey solution. We may invest in a SATABoy (that is what the company reccomended we use over their other more expensive products) with a few alike things to the previous systems. Anyone here familular with Sata boy?"

It's a storage array that the vendor can configure as fibre or iSCSI. There are dozens, if not hundreds of similar products.

If it's fibre, it will probably work fine but there's still no guarantee. You'll also need fibre channel cards for every mac, plus a switch. You'll also need the full version of MetaSAN for each client (not the price-reduced iSCSI-only version). This is a very expensive option comparatively. But I'm guessing you want the iSCSI option, in which case you will have serious problems. GlobalSAN is untested on the vast majority of iSCSI target products and will likely either perform poorly or simply not work at all. Chances are it runs Linux or Solaris, so you will have problems. Small Tree sells a Mac iSCSI initiator, but there's no guarantee that will work either unless they've tested it themselves.

On top of that, the RAID controller has probably not been tested to run a RAID formatted with the HFS file system. That probably doesn't matter, but it's still an unknown. These things are extremely complex and something simple like that could cause a major problem if nobody's bothered to test it using a Mac client.

I don't know the price but I'm sure the Sataboy still costs a few thousand at least. Add a switch and six licenses of MetaSAN to that and you're spending a decent chunk of money for something that is completely untested for Mac clients - let alone video editing. Among the community of customers who run Macs, you'll probably be the only one. Look at the message board on the SNS website. Look how many dozens of iSCSI products people have problems working with Globalsan. And look at the Xsanity forum and see how many problems people have with random fibre switches and other products.

For a lot less money you can do a non-SAN AFP file sharing setup like in Walter Biscardi's article using the cheapest Mac Pro as a server. Again, this option is CHEAPER than the Sataboy iSCSI solution. You don't need MetaSAN at all (read Chris Blair's reply). Or use MetaLan, which is a similar solution except that it uses a Windows server instead of a Mac.

Sean