SAN over Gig-E??

[FCPSylvan]

Our company is getting a Virage system that will manage media for use on our multiple FCP edit "nodes". It will be a true SAN, but it may not be connected by the traditional fibrechannel. I know SANs have been and are used successfully with FCP, but this one may need to work over gigabit ethernet instead of the more obvious fibrechannel (cost savings). Would this even work in OS X? The bandwidth should be enough for DV sharing to multiple workstations, but I'm worried that trying to make it happen over Gig-E might not be kosher with respect to FCP...

Can anyone confirm this could work? Can FCP utilize media files what is essentially a remote SAN? The idea makes me nervous... The broadcast guy designing the setup is pretty confident it will work (or that it has worked for others...) Anyone heard of this?

[Ned_Soltz]

I'm not totally certain about this one. Roarke has announced an OS X SAN solution and you might want to check that one out. In the absence of a lot of options with SAN in OS X, one house I know of will be merely placing clips on a server and users will transfer those clips over the network (don't know whether it is fibre channel of g-bit until I actually get over there to see the set up) locally to their FCP stations, edit, and then transfer changed files and project files back to the server. Not a very elegant solution but in this case, there are only a limited number of clips that multiple editors need to share.

But I would be interested in knowing whether this set up works for you or whether others have tried something similar.

Ned Soltz
2-pop Guide