Friday, May 26, 2006

Fibre cross-over cables

We sell several SAN solutions depending on requirements for number of clients, bandwidth (DV, SD television, HiDef TV or Film) and platform - these are the ones we either sell a lot of or provide support for;

  • DVS SAN is a superb solution for higher throughput applications - if you're into DI film workflows then this is the boy - based on ADIC's SFS file system.
  • Avid Unity is the origional television SAN - I ran several location reality shows on these. V1 came out in the late '90s and it's looking a bit creaky now (even though they support 4 gig fibre) and hard to manage. Rumour is that it was based on IBM Tivoli SANergy technology
  • Lanshare is Avid's SAN-in-a-box, origionally for offline & DV resolution. It now support multiple standard definition clients through fibre.
  • Terrablock from Facilis is another single-unit SAN but hits the price/performance sweet spot that Avid misses - this is Root6's big seller. They are starting to offer distrubuted filing across multiple TerraBlocks which makes it a very interesting product.
Anyhow - in the systems dept. of Root6 we do lots of fibre installs - and one thing I always ask at the comissioning stage is "host-host or host-fibre switch?" (or "SAN-in-a-box / big SAN" to put it another way!) and people are suprised that you have to swap the TX-RX path if you're working host-host. Kind of stands to reason that when there is no fibre switch you'd need it. So, when someone looks at me suspiciously in the future I'll hand them this little leaflet that DIS ship with the patch-cords.

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