xserve xraid

[JSt0rm]

so we were talking at work how nice it would be to have all the large files on one server that all the studio computers can access at once. The good thing is that all of the computers are right next to each other so we wouldn't have to run much fiber optics. The bad thing of course is the price of set up.

With fiber is there a 2gbit per second one and a 4gbit per second one? And is there a way to get the actual throughput without putting it together? I don't want to get 4gbit if we only need 2 but I don't want to spend the money and find out we actually needed 4.

Storage: 1 xraid and 1 xserve could hold how many drives? We would probably use 1tb drives just to get the most out of the hardware and slide them in 2 at a time until we needed another xraid. I think this would be the most economical.

I guess I'm just thinking out loud here and I am going to do lots of research before we spend 10k on this kind of set up but if anybody has any thought on this please feel free to drop them in. I might post over at networking as well but I think they will tell us to not get a mac. ALL the computers in that place are mac (I'm typing on a pc now though.)

Thanks

 

[timswim78]

An XRAID has room for 14 hot-swappable drives (10.5TB).
Source: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

 

[timswim78]

This site seems to be a good intro to Fiber Channel.
http://searchstorage.techtarge...sid5_gci969851,00.html

 

[Tegeril]

Originally posted by: timswim78
An XRAID has room for 14 hot-swappable drives (105TB).
Source: http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/

105 > 10.5

 

[Nothinman]

I don't want to get 4gbit if we only need 2 but I don't want to spend the money and find out we actually needed 4.

The bottleneck will undoubtedly be the drives and not the network, especially if you have multiple people accessing the same volume for different files all of the time.

I might post over at networking as well but I think they will tell us to not get a mac. ALL the computers in that place are mac

Which would probably be the best idea if you can get another brand cheaper. OS X supports SMB just fine so any brand server running just about any OS will work just as well.