Written by Helmut Lottenburger
Post-Production Workflow Specialist
The Promise SANlink allows you to connect any Apple computer with Thunderbolt port to a FibreChannel environment.
Benefits of FibreChannel over Thunderbolt:
1)
At this point in time all available "Thunderbolt enabled" storage devices do not offer any additional interfaces (such as USB 3.0 or eSATA).
This makes devices such as Promise Pegasus and some LaCie disks virtually useless in a mixed OS environment running Windows or Linux.
2)
FibreChannel infrastructure allows you to scale "big" by using FibreChannel switches.
Thunderbolt technology allows you to scale as well by simply daisy chaining the devices. However, if a storage device "in the middle" fails, so do all other devices "up stream".
3)
Currently, Thunderbolt storage does not provide any level of hardware redundancy. Power supply units (PSU) and storage controllers are not easily accessible and require to "open" the whole unit in order to access it.
Some post-production workflow examples:
1)Thunderbolt storage makes a great mezzanine storage. Move the data from one location to the other, plug the Mac into the central storage (XSAN/StorNext) and copy the footage with high-speed to it's permanent destination.
2)
Finishing applications such as DaVinci Resolve and Autodesk Smoke for Mac can use the Promise array as their "local storage". Uncompressed renderings (and playback) will not affect the overall performance of the SAN which can quickly decrease when one or more uncompressed streams are accessing it.
The above scenario shows an effective way to utilize an uncompressed finishing workflow that does not impact a central storage.
Note, that the SANlink in this example can connect to a AJA or Blackmagic Design video I/O device as well!