Well for us long term Apple server engineers, we are now living in a post-xserve world!

Everytime I go to NAB I am daunted by the enormity of all the technology that is there and feel that I actually know nothing about technology at all.  It is just overwhelming!   That being said this years NAB was filled with some fantastic technologies that will propel us forward in providing server solution and services to the traditional Apple desktop space and the ever increasing Mobile space.   So my over all impression, is that I am very much energised about the way forward for storage and server offerings, particularly those in the SAN (storage area networking) .

There is some great stuff here, and there is certainly a move for many vendors either supporting Stornext or FalconStor HyperFS (which is gaining some momentum). One of the big things as in David’s last post (link),  is Thunderbolt. Very impressive 6 times faster than FireWire 800 sustained.  Interestingly enough, Verizon has a trademark on Thunderbolt for its 4G LTE network, so it will be interesting to see what happens there in this wonderful world of Trademark and Copyright law.

A couple of issues:

1. Cable length is limited to 3m (no biggie really)
2. You can only daisychain 6 devices (today) so no xsan for you – unless of course you are using a Promise Fibre to Thunderbolt converter box
3. After the 3rd daisy chained device, apparently the performance drops considerably for each connected device.

ActiveStorage is getting a LOT of attention. The MDC’s they have built are very price competitive and are around 30% better performance than Xserves running as MDCs!! DEFINITELY something to look at. The ActiveSAN boxes run QUANTUM’s StorNext on Linux, so it is not unlike XSAN in design.

There are several SAN vendors now, in fact more than last year, so there are plenty of choices for small environments. As examples, TIger Technology with their MetaSAN software and RorkeData’s FalconStor to name two.

A number of SAN vendors are OEM’ing QUANTUM StorNext, which seems to be fast becoming a standard.

The other big thing is CLOUD EVERYTHING…….. “just put everything in the cloud” call me a skeptic, but HD 2K and 4K in the cloud. Not this week I’m guessing. There are a number of companies pushing the whole, put your content in the cloud and edit in the cloud. Interesting concept until the internet connection dies, as it did in a demo. oops.

My next post will look at some of the cool products that I saw and discuss where I think they fit into the grand scheme of things.