xsan for autodesk flame systems on RH Linux?

Hi Folks,

I run an Autodesk flame system running Red Hat Linux. It uses a direct attached Promise Vtrak E610FD (dark grey) and gets around 750Mb/s.

I also have a Mac Pro that Switch boots between Mac OS 10.8.2 and Red Hat. It, too has an Apple brand Promise Vtrak E610FD attached which is formatted for RH storage and it runs Autodesk Flare and also pulls 750Mb/s off the raid. I cannot read or write to the raid when I'm booted for Mac OS.

Both of those machines have 10G ethernet with a cable and no switch between those cards. They work together on projects and there is tons of duplications across the two raids. Copying between them is quick over 10G. More and more they access data on the other machine and that slows down the foreground processes.

I would love to be able to upload/download files to the filesystem quickly from an attached mac, as most of the images arrive from editors that seem to only use macs. The linux machines have trouble with Journaled mac disks. 1G ethernet from my powerbook is very slow.

I am considering creating a single Xsan volume using both E610FD's that they can share using Stornext client. I saw Promise demo using Mac Minis as metadata controllers which would be great.

My only 8gb fibre channel hardware is the card in the Flame system.

Questions:

Which Fibre switches are currently supported by Xsan under MacOS 10.8?

Is there any advantage to buying an 8Gb switch?

I definately want maximum speed. Do I have to reformat all of the storage at once?

I've read that raid 6 is better than Raid 5. Should I reconfigure all of my storage to start?

Will I get better performance with a San, since all of the storage is striped? (both of the cards in the workstations have 4 ports).

Can a metadata server, or backup metadata server also function as an upload/download station?

Do Metadata servers need to be attached to the storage by fibre channel?

Do I need two metadata servers?

Is there a more cost effective solution than Xsan (free) and Stornext FX ~$2k/node(2)?

I'm pretty technical but am I insane for trying to do this on my own?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Sam Edwards