Referral for some help in LA?

[cinelicious]

I run a small but growing post production company called... you guessed it... Cinelicious. We do film scanning, HD telecine and color grading for commercials and movies. I'm a bit of a geek myself but am a little light in the networking/SAN management and draw the line at zoning my sanbox 5600. I'm looking for someone to come in and help us get set up with a few things as we've just moved to a new facility in Hollywood and acquired some new gear that is fairly unique.

The immediate problem I want to solve is I've got an older SGI Octane 2 computer that I believe runs Unix. It's a key component in an older film scanning/data transfer protocol called "hippi transfer" which uses the "Phantom Transfer Engine" software running on the Octane over 1Gig Fiber. I want to get the Octane to mount a more modern volume on our network so we can scan film to a faster array to use the data on modern systems. I have no idea how to get the 1000 Base SX port "talking" to the outside world. Ideally I'd like to find a way to attach the Octane to a our 4Gb/8Gb fiber switches and mount other volumes without having to buy StorNext (yet). I guess I wonder if those volumes have to be Linux (NFS or EX3?) or could they be Mac HFS+?

So far we've gotten by with 15 TB on two HFS+ Ciprico volumes and 1 4GB fiber switch with all our clients being Macs doing volume level sharing with SanMP. Now that we're stepping up the game quite a bit and adding some Unix & Linux gear I see XSan in my immediate future and StorNext probably 3 months out. However I have no experience integrating these systems and am looking for some help. Unfortunately all of this is coming out of my own pocket so I can't afford a big integration team... but would be happy to pay for some light consulting and maybe a longer term relationship could develop as we grow.

Feel free to contact me and mention this post.

Best,

Paul
www.cinelicious.tv

[Ernesto Sanchez]

My top choice is always Santech. They've done alot of the XSAN installs in the LA area. Jerry and Shane are the two lead techs, http://santech.tv

About hooking up your Octane to a "Modern volume." I suggest going over GbE vice FC. It is a lot cheaper then buying a Stornext license. You could possibly bond a few GbE lines to boost the throughput if needed. You can get apx 70MBs over a single RJ45 from a reshare of a XSAN volume over AFP or NFS. Also curious to see if that Phantom transfer software runs on Linux.


Cheers,
Ernesto
Toybox Entertainment
818-557-0012

[cinelicious]

Thanks Ernesto,
I think you might be right about that. Also... since posting this I've realized it's running IRIX which I believe is a subtle difference but I'll give Jerry and Shane a call and see if they feel confident they can work this out.

Best,

Paul

[mark raudonis]

Another vote for Shane and Jerry... they rock!

mark

[beskone]

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but you can hit me up at CompuTech Support Services - we're Xsan certified and have a number of fairly big, and some pretty technical Xsan installs that we support. Including the combining 2 different Xsan installs into one Xsan with 2 mountable volumes in 2 separate buildings setup I posted about a few months back