I'm not editing video, I'm...

aaron · Site Admin Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 405

It is clear that Xsan's most common use is for editing video with Final Cut Pro. Our readers are certainly using Xsan for other applications, too.

What's on your Xsan?
_________________
Aaron Freimark
http://www.tekserve.com/vcard/af.vcf

aaron · Site Admin Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 405

To brazenly respond to my own question...

Tekserve is a large Apple reseller and service shop in New York City. How large? We repair more than 200 Macs daily.

Our 24TB Xsan is reshared by three Xserves to a private (no Internet!), 260-node gigabit network. A fourth Xserve is a dedicated MDC. Nearly every Mac that comes in for service is NetBooted to this network, and many are backed up to the Xsan. (NetBoot lets us isolate software from hardware problems.) Disk Utility is our favorite utility for doing these backups.

Also on the SAN are copies of every installer that ever shipped with modern Macs. We use these to restore Macs to known-good configurations.
_________________
Aaron Freimark
http://www.tekserve.com/vcard/af.vcf

JonThompson · Xsan Master Joined: 06 Apr 2007 Posts: 123

My SAN is my data workhorse for the organization. Re-shares, Network Home Directories, Web, Final Cut Server (for photos), Software Update Server. Basically everything _but_ Final Cut video editing, although we have years of video archive on the SAN.

The SAN gives me the ability to reallocate space between servers and services on the fly. It also abstracts out space and processor cycles so that I am not wasting money on space or cycles I don't need.

ACSA · Xsan Master Joined: 28 Jan 2007 Posts: 104

Multiple SAN's under management:
types:
1: Office SAN: reshare data to both Windows as Mac clients., storage for the Exchange DD, storage for the Oracle DB (back-office application). Roaming profiles are being served via the XServe. Dedicated Mac Pro as MDC.
(several of those... Very Happy

)

2: Video SAN. Higher education. 15 clients and "only" 6.5 TB large......

jbachman · fully protected Joined: 11 Apr 2007 Posts: 13

At Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia, PA we do audio archive and digitization for cultural heritage institutions. We have a 17TB SAN online for storage of the audio files during projects. Our workflow incorporates a few different people, audio capture engineer, burning/finishing engineer and quality control, so a SAN is perfect for us.

Pablitus · Knows DNS is the answer Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Posts: 37

Well...we have an 40TB XSAN with 4 Volumes....each one has an specific function.

Vol1 (4TB) is for Media Encoding "drop box"....engines used: Episode, FlipFactory and Carbon.

Vol2 (12TB) is a big File Share....with the 95% of capacity used Smile

Vol3 (12TB) is a Scratch Disk for FCP

Vol4 (9TB) is a Volume for FCS

matx · Xsan Master Joined: 15 Apr 2005 Posts: 378

Xsan is great for VFX and render farms. Shake, Maya, Nuke, Lightwave, etc.

abstractrude · Xsan Master Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 863

the primary Xsan I admin does everything for the department except the primary AFP share which is done with DAS. I have had weird experiences with AFP and xsan, especially in the 1.4 days. That being said xsan2 did a lot to make things go smoother. The xsan provides data storage for everything done in the post production environment. About 100TB.

BenT · Knows DNS is the answer Joined: 12 Jun 2007 Posts: 39

** Humor below**
--------
I saw this on an advertisement for XSAN:

“Use optimized workflow configuration settings for higher efficiency and maximum performance, and ensure that your 42’yacht stays moored in even the roughest of hurricanes. Let our clustered storage weighing over 1.8 Tonnes give you peace of mind that your vessel will never disappear"

morphenine · Xsan Master Joined: 22 Dec 2008 Posts: 126

Well, I work for the library services (or "The Vault" if you will) for a major motion picture company...
We have several Xsan setups here in our division...
A couple that come in just under 100TB (I don't deal with those ones). Our main one that totals about 160TB, I co-admin this one since it was here before me. Its all older hardware running under Tiger, G5 Xserves, Xsan 1.4
Then theres my baby. Its a 34TB XSan with 6 XServes dedicated to it... 2 MDCs, 1 fileserver, 1 tape backup controller, 2 OD servers (master/replica). Its fully integrated into the Open Directory setup on our private production network. The latter 2 SANs are primarily used for temporary storage and reorganizing of ProTools files before we send them off to be archived. Of course we have a couple of Final Cuts and get the occasional DPX or Quicktime moving through.

pixel · RAID 5 Joined: 19 Sep 2008 Posts: 15

rstasel · Xsan Master Joined: 03 Aug 2007 Posts: 120

We've got a 10TB Xsan that we primarily use for AFP Network homes, and AFP shares. We're starting to use it for FCS, and webserver storage.

soward · Could work for Apple Joined: 30 Dec 2007 Posts: 42

We do resharing...AFP and SMB, mostly SMB to about 1000 odd XP and Vista machines, ususally see > 500 SMB's at one time throughout the day.

We also host web pages/sites/applications.

Started with Xsan 1.0, G5s and Xserve RAIDs. Still have some 1.4 in use, but mostly moved to intel, Xsan2, and Promise.

All backed by AD.

soward · Could work for Apple Joined: 30 Dec 2007 Posts: 42

I forgot the mention the sizes: old 1.4 system is about 7T, new intel/promise setup is about ~75T. And that we also use it as a repository to do 'disk2disk' backups of a few other systems.

Jerome · Been around the blocks Joined: 28 Mar 2008 Posts: 27

We work in the music industry (film + popular music)... we use Xsan to share our Logic sequences, audio files and video files. It allows us to work on the same volume without ever noticing that we're not actually on an internal drive. We love it Smile

Our system:
- 6TB xServe RAID
- 2x xServe G5 (server + mdc)
- 2 Mac Pro 3 Ghz (workstations)

Very simple yet very efficient Smile

J.