Re: Shared storage considerations, Fiber Channel, 10GbE or Thunderbolt?

would you care to elaborate further? what other protocols that NAS usually support? what do you mean with dual power?
i'm also curious about the difference about 10GbE SFP+ (with copper or fibre cables) & 10GBASE-T (Cat6A) since i can't find a comparison of the two that states the pros & cons. i imagine a Cat6A would have a better durability & length factor. is it latency that makes SFP+ still preferred now?

REPLY -
NAS support .afp, .smb, and .nfs. 10GbE with SFP+ fibre transceivers are currently more popular and more readily available. Cat6A is not as widely available from many manufacturers, and there are less switch companies that make RJ45 CAT6A swithes - specifically, right now, the only RJ45 Cat6A switches come from Small Tree, Interface Masters and Arista Networks - that's it. For SFP+ Fibre 10g switches, there are LOTS of companies that make these.
The Cat6A switches cost a LOT more money - around $15,000 US. One day these prices will drop - today is not that day.


i have been told that a certain company would release a NAS storage that has a dual 10GbE connection but not aggregated, it only uses the ports & cables as channels.

REPLY - you can get this right now from many companies, using standard protocols, using Linux, OS X or Windows 2008 Server depending on what brand you choose. No aggrigation - just direct connect 10gig from server to client.

They wrote their own filesystem as well, which is their main weakness point so far, since it means they have to write a driver for other OS in order to get those operating systems to recognize the storage/server filesystem (as proprietary system would). Otherwise their product is very much interesting aside the price, which is not released yet, i'm sure it isn't that expensive in terms of value, but it would still be quite a lot money since they have more than 50TB. i don't think it's wise for our company to buy it because of that, not in this stage anyway.

RPELY - my advice is that you find a company that will give you support in Indonesia. Many US companies do not have support in Indonesia. I would be happy to pitch my system, as we can do direct connect 10gig ethernet, but I can't support you properly, unless you consider long distance remote access the kind of support that you find acceptable.

Creative Cow shows lots and lots of companies that sell shared storage - almost all are excellent. I do not know who can support you in Indonesia, except for remote support over the internet.

Bob Zelin