Re: Facilis Terrablock San System Feedback good?

[Mark Raudonis] "The bandwidth that he's able to push through plain old gig E is extraordinary"

Now you sound like a car salesman. You do realize that no matter how good it is, it's physically impossible for it to be greater than 1gb?

This could be a solid product. But it doesn't matter how good it is. It's $20k for ethernet. That is a RIP-OFF. Studio Network Solutions have been doing the same exact thing for a long time BTW. I don't mean to knock either company. But it just doesn't make any sense considering you can go Fibre for $20k.

I hate mentioning this in the Terrablock thread. But I'm going to. If I had to get a SAN tomorrow, I would do this:

1) Buy an Areca 4gb Fibre-to-SATA external RAID-5 controller. They're like $2k. They turn up to sixteen SATA disks into FC hardware raid.

2) Connect it to just about any eSATA array you want (like all the ones advertised here). Or put your own together.

3) Buy a used Qlogic SANbox switch on ebay.

4) Buy FC cards for all the Macs. PCI-X G5's can use the old Qlogic cards, which are going for like $150 on ebay.

5) Buy licenses for MetaSAN or Xsan.

That's all you need. It's essentially the same as the Xserve RAID setup - except it's a hell of a lot cheaper and a lot more scalable.




Sean