| FibreJet
lets you build bigger clusters than Xsan.
Xsan is only limited to 64 nodes. FibreJet has no such limitation.
Furthermore, FibreJet doesn’t degrade in performance simply
because more nodes are added. Gain supercomputing power by consolidating
your server and storage resources into a cluster.
The new way to access a cluster
data set
Whether deploying a clusters for scientific analysis or distributed
rendering, using FibreJet to access the large data set over the
SAN is much better than coping with the traditional NAS file sharing
method, which limits scalability and performance. The Xsan architecture
is similar to NAS, but optimized to move the data directly by the
SAN clients, while all the metadata is moved similar to traditional
NAS — this is why Xsan suffers from similar limitations, it
is the traffic cop for I/O in the SAN.
Crunch a single data pool with
as many processors as you can muster
Using pure Fibre Channel architecture, you can add as much storage
capacity, computer processors, and network bandwidth as the hardware
limitations allow, and have FibreJet manage it all to for a extremely
large, extremely fast cluster to crunch that data set. All nodes
can mount the same SAN file system and read directly from the same
files — no replication whatsoever.
Want even more computing power?
If you’ve done all you can on the Fibre Channel side and still
need more processing power, then you can turn those SAN nodes into
NAS heads or special servers and serve the data set out to even
more processors over Ethernet, and on to the Internet even, if that
is what you want. Because FibreJet is a truly distributed architecture,
with no metadata controller bottlenecks, as you find with Xsan,
it can serve out more and not bog down.
Save money, while doing more
FibreJet costs less much less than Xsan. You can save $23,383 on
even a small 6-set solution, as compared to Xsan.
More Flexible Volume Management
Far superior to Apple’s Xsan, FibreJet uses standard disk
utilities to control volume management. This allows multiple storage
pools with different characteristics to be constructed on portions
of the same storage LUNs at the same time, and reconfigured later
without affecting other data on the LUNs. In Contrast, with Apple’s
Xsan, you can only use entire whole LUNs at a time to create storage
pools. And what’s worse, with Xsan, once a LUN is committed
for a purpose, it must forevermore be used for the single purpose
unless you destroy all the data on the entire volume that the storage
pool is but a member. That’s why Apple’s so-call volume
expansion is a joke, you can actually only add capacity to a volume
in terms of another storage pool, which must be constructed again
from entire whole LUNs. This means the expanded volume doesn’t
benefit for example from more LUNs working together for a stripe
set, but only that additional storage pool isolated — it does
nothing for the rest of the volume!
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FibreJet excels at building
a supercomputer:
Server and Storage consolidation Aggregate
storage pools, without committing forever what and how they
are used. Reduce unutilized storage. Redeploy storage assets
with a click.
Volume-level locking
Allows multiple servers to safely connect to a shared volume
with read access, while enforcing a single writer at a time.
You can still have multiple writers at the same time, they
are just to different parts of the storage. This avoids issues,
such as with Xsan, where multiple people will overwrite each
others work without warning, such as happens with Final Cut
Pro.
No Metadata Controller
Perhaps the single best feature of the FibreJet SAN. Because
FibreJet as no metadata controller, it can scale in performance
and capacity without limit. In contrast, with Xsan, the metadata
controller is a single traffic-cop bottleneck to every I/O
in the SAN, and has similar limitations as NAS. Don’t
believe us? Read Apple’s own Xsan discussion board of
real users for the nightmares experienced with Apple’s
Xsan metadata controller, including how well the failover
really works.
Xserve Cluster Node
CommandSoft can provide all your computing needs directly,
as an Apple reseller.
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