Why Shared Storage?
The Short Answer:
To save time and money, improve workflow efficiency and make you money.
The Long Answer:
For many years, digital storage has been directly attached to, or embedded in, workstations (computers). Direct-attach storage works fine if you work completely alone, don’t care much about storage efficiency, and don’t need to share your data. If you work in a team as a member of a work group as more of us do everyday; you want to save storage dollars as economic realities require of us more and more; or need to share data efficiently for workflow to be truly productive; then direct-attach storage is no longer an option. Direct-attach storage forces you to physically “swap” storage devices, a process commonly known as “sneakernet”. This leads us to acquire excess storage, or slowly “stream” high bandwidth data between workstations. These outdated models become “old crutches” when applied as solutions and are extremely inefficient from a workflow perspective; they are costly from a storage perspective, and highly dangerous from a data integrity point of view. The cure for all this high cost high risk behavior is the SAN solution: The storage area network is a centralized pool of high-speed, shared storage that is efficiently networked to provide an environment in which working together is simple, efficient and profitable – – the fastest of these solutions is the Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN).
A Fibre Channel SAN is not a luxury if you are involved in digital content creation – – it is an elegant solution to a highly demanding work environment and is very likely an absolute necessity. The SAN eliminates the bottlenecks, risks, and inefficient data sharing associated with direct-attached storage (DAS) in a workflow environment where data integrity is essential to the work process and the finished product. The SAN creates an instantaneous, shared networking environment, which enhances and streamlines the creative process as well as enabling you to meet important deadlines and budgets. The storage capacity is sized to your shared data requirements and not wasted on individual workstation requirements. The cost of the SAN is paid for many times over in terms of editor time saved, enhanced creativity, storage efficiency, schedules met, and projects accomplished within budget! CommandSoft’s FibreJet® SAN management software enables simultaneous access to the same storage from multiple workstations at speeds up to 200 MB per second one-way or 400 MB per second two-way and beyond with the latest 8 gigabit Fibre Channel infrastructure, allowing multiple editors to work on the same source data without interruption and without data integrity worries. With CommandSoft’s FibreJet® software and a Fibre Channel SAN, time is spent on content creation and not storage, or risk management.
In less intense environs iSCSI remains a viable SAN solution. As the next step beyond DAS using eSATA or direct attached SATA drives in some external RAID managed storage, iSCSI in a RAID controlled SAN can be a useful solution to shared data crunching and managed data storage. FibreJet as your SAN management solution is equally effective regardless of the SAN hardware you choose to store your data on. Sharing efficiently in an elegantly simple solution is what FibreJet is all about.
