Shared storage for imacs

[mordzy]

Hi there,

I have a mac room with 5 iMacs connected to each other via a 1gb SMC switch (cheap switch). I also have a laice raid box - sata raid 5 on 1gb lag connected to the same switch.

The files we open tend to be from 600 to 1.5gb files for artwork and video etc. we tend to find that our shared storage works fine if one person is opening or saving work, but it tends to grind everyone else to a halt if the then try and open or save. I'm thinking its the network rather than the box.

Im wondering if there is some better shared storage that either allows multiple machines to plug in via thunderbolt or it has multiple gigabit interfaces so that i can team or set each interface on its own ip and get the iMacs to connect to different ip's which would load balance.

Might be looking in the wrong place but thought id ask.

Cheers

 

[leman]

Well, aside from professional (read: expensive as hell) stuff like Fibre Channel, I am afraid that your choice is rather limited. I would be not so sure that its the network though. A gigabit networt should (in theory) allow transfer speeds up to 100Mbytes/s, so it should be enough for a NAS. I think it is more likely that your NAS box is not optimized for multiple user access. Or maybe its your router which has problems with the throughput? You can try setting up QoS for your router to prioritize the file traffic (although it may couse more problems that it will solve).

I don't think thunderbolt is the way to go — it is explicitly designed as a one-client expansion tech.

You could look QNAP products (http://www.qnap.com): their pro range of products offers soem NAS units with multiple gigabit switches. And from what I read, their products are top quality.

 

[mordzy]

Thanks for that

i have not been able to come to any other conclusion other than the lan. admittedly i cannont connect to the laice unit as the guy who set it up changed the password and left. it has 5 disks in it so i either a 4 disk raid 5 with hot spare or just a big raid 5.

with regards fibre, how do i get such a card into an iMac.

I had looked at some SAN boxes that had iscsi x8 port which i though might work well. but as per your suggestion, some Qnap boxes have 10gb ethernet. i could potentially use this along with a network switch that has a sfp port for 10gb ethernet.

i should probably do some more investigation and testing but would also appreciate other suggestions.

One thing that did cross my mind is the speed of the internal mac hdd causing the bottle neck. but for a single user it should be fine.