Can XSAN under Lion Server (w/Lion clients) be set up purely using a Thunderbolt RAID and Thunderbolt client connections (i.e. no Fiber Channel)? I'm using a Promise 12TB Raid as the repository for my image library and would dearly like to have a two-seat SAN to access from two machines, using a Thunderbolt Mac Mini as the MDC. Has anyone successfully set up such an arrangement yet?
The way Xsan/Stornext is designed this will not work. All direct attached clients will need direct access to any storage pools/LUNs being used in the SAN volume, which is fiber.
Also you COULD just reshare the direct attached Promise RAID via AFP or NFS to another machine if gigabit speeds were enough for you.
One way to do this would be to set up a Thunderport Mac Mini system that then can be seen by your other Mac machines. You will not be able to see the Promise 12TB Raid but you will be able to sub-NAS the system if you have a Air Port Extreme Base Station. The problem is that you could incur extra problems.
What I have done is link a Promise 12TB Raid system with an Mac Mini and then connected that to my Mac Pro 12 Core and then used the Fibre Channel to expose it to my Xserve clusters and Mac Pros. This works very well but is very costly. I would not recomend going down this root without serious thought to what you want this system to do.
You could use a Mac Mini with an external RAID controller with Fibre Channel, these are expensive but no where near the cost of a Mac Pro. These opperate over the GBethernet and run very quickly and stably.
Many thanks for the helpful responses: my primary need is to work with Aperture from both an iMac and my MB Air - had I been able to share the RAID via Thunderbolt by using a Lion Server Mac Mini as the MDC, whilst sharing it more widely using Ethernet, that would have been ideal. As it is, I'll hook it up to the iMac and then connect the MBA via Airport - not ideal, as even GB ethernet kills Aperture performance (actually, ANYTHING kills Aperture performance) - I can't justify going Fibre Channel for a nice-to-have rather than absolutely essential need.
RIchard
Apple says that you can connect two Apple Devices to a Promise 12 TB Raid device. So you should be good for connecting your iMac and MBA using two Thunderbolt cables to the two thunderbolt ports on the Promise 12TB Raid device.
Hopefully this clears things up. I have tried my Pegasus this way and it works no problem! 🙂
Just for your personal interest, there will be a four port version launched Q1 2012. Wooo! 🙂
Funny how the simple things work best. Thanks for that - I'll give it a try! So I'm assuming that each Thunderbolt port on a Promise RAID has its own cache and that their RAID controller handles at least a basic level of arbitration. Interesting....
And four ports would be even more useful, but hey, this is what we get for being early adopters!
Let us know how this goes for you. I am extremely interested. I am still skeptical for a few reasons though. One, I only see references in apple's documentation to being able to plug in an apple computer on one end and then having a thunderbolt/mini display port based Apple Display at the other end which would be two apple devices. Two, there is no switching protocol built into Thunderbolt and if you plugged in two computers into the same direct attached RAID, if it was formated HFS, the two computers wouldn't know what the other was doing and corrupt the data after a minute or so.
But again, let me know how it goes. Thanks!
Christopher Collins wrote:
I am still skeptical for a few reasons though. One, I only see references in apple's documentation to being able to plug in an apple computer on one end.
I understand that Apple do not say that the Promise 12TB Raid device will work with 2 Apple Desktop machines connected but there are a few people on the Internet with videos, blogs and tutorials on how to do it.
If you have OS X Lion on both machines, connected to the same network - for some reason, will automatically find the other machine through the Promise 12TB Raid device and both will connect.
Christopher Collins wrote:
Two, there is no switching protocol built into Thunderbolt and if you plugged in two computers into the same direct attached RAID, if it was formated HFS, the two computers wouldn't know what the other was doing and corrupt the data after a minute or so.
There is no switching protocol built into Thunderbolt, but there is a switching protocol in the embedded Raid system. With the HFS format, the two computers will only be able to work on different documents, you might be able to view what is happening to the document on another Mac but you will not be able to simultaneously edit the same document unless you bank up on four HDDs using Raid 5 where OS X Lion would use localised versions on the Promise 12TB Raid device. This is very simple to do but would need a localising protocol programme.
Creating XSAN using Thunderbolt RAID?
