I saw something wonderful and new at NAB today. The Accusys ExaSAN Thunderbolt shared storage shouldn’t exist but there it is. With 16 x 4TB drives and 4 Thunderbolt ports out the back to connect 4 clients (one of which could be a Mac mini acting as a Xsan 4 controller). That leaves 3 spots for Mac clients for a small editing SAN or post-production workflow. Prices to be revealed soon, I hope. Very interesting for small setups.
Apple released Yosemite (OS X 10.10) today. The big news for me is the built-in version of Xsan is v.4. But don’t get too excited and upgrade your OS without some planning (and backups). If your systems are in production then please leave them as is. Install OS X 10.10 on a test system first. Install a test Xsan and play with that. Don’t test in production. ‘Nough said.
What you need to know is, if you upgrade your Mac to 10.10 then it is officially incompatible with Xsan 3. You can NOT have Xsan 3 (10.9) clients on a 10.10 Xsan, and I don’t think that 10.10 (Xsan 4) clients will work on a Xsan 3 based SAN. There may be a hack to get incompatible versions working together but that’s left to imaginative tinkerers and not useful for production where deadlines are involved.
I’ve done some basic testing with Xsan 4 and it does away with the Xsan Admin app, all setup is done in the Server.app. Also, it depends on Open Directory (and DNS, of course). If there is no OD master set up then it will create one (same with DNS). If you have OD then join your Xsan controllers to it as replicas or else they will create a new OD master on the first Xsan controller and a replica on the second. You were warned.
To configure the clients you export a config profile and install it on the clients, or alternatively you can enrol the Xsan controller in MDM (Profile Manager, for example) and push out the config to the clients.
I have not tested Xsan 4 with StorNext but I expect there is compatibility, as usual.
In Summary:
More testing is needed, but strictly speaking Xsan 4 is not going to work with Xsan 3 and vice versa. If an Xsan 3 (10.9 client) is part of Xsan 4 (10.10) then it may work but commands and configs will not come across (unmount / mount the volume, the volume is destroyed stop looking for it, etc).
And now for some screenshots of the actual setup.
Step 1. Install Server. Turn on Xsan and get ready to rumble.
Step 2. Change your name. If you’re using dot-local change it.
Step 3. Set up valid DNS
Step 4. Set up a new SAN
Step 5. Choose a SAN name
Step 6. Configure Users and Groups (OD)
Step 7. Choose your organization name
Step 8. Create the Xsan volume
Step 9. Add LUNs to your storage
Step 10. Save a configuration profile
Step 11. Deploy config to clients
Use MDM or manually deliver the file to your clients.
Stay tuned.
DAM SAN 