New workflow ideas with the New Mac Pro

I work in a smallish post house, 3 editors and 4 Producer/Editors, we have the budget to start upgrading to new Mac Pros and storage, so we are looking in to our workflow at the same time, so was wondering if anybody had any opinion on best approach.

We currently have a slow 1gig ethernet connection to a shared SAN (SPACE) Unit, this is not fit for purpose and hasn't been for quite a while due to numerous issues surrounding data management, so now we have the chance and budget we want to look at ways of improving this. So far our initial thoughts have come to two solutions:

Solution 1: Upgrade to a new SAN using 10gig Ethernet, Buy Mac Pros, Thunderbolt PCI Expansion boxes, 10gig Ethernet Cards etc..

Solution 2: Downgrade our current SAN to a Backup SAN only, buy Mac Pros, Promise Pegasus 2 RAIDs, Nightly Backup the RAIDs to the SAN etc.

We kind of like the desktop RAID solution, but we are not quite sure on how workable this is in an environment where we occasionally have to share FCPX libraries between either and Editor or Producer for minor tweaks etc.

The biggest problem we have since I joined and am now trying to sort out as Senior Editor and Process Monkey, is to stop people just chucking tons of data on the SAN and never backing up and removing in good time so it keeps getting full up, which is why implementing a desktop RAID solution with a proper data management process seems quite attractive at the moment.

So if anybody has any experience of good workflow ideas then please let me know, I just need to make sure the right decision is made before the cash is spent.

Anything else you need to ask me that I have missed out then feel free.

Thanks in advance.

You may want to look at solutions from Small Tree,
www.small-tree.com/

and/or from Cantemo.
cantemo.com/


I'm confused about your mixing of SAN and Ehternet. Why not get T'bolt SAN adapters and put everyone directly on the SAN fibre channel? Install a Cantemo server, perhaps. Run a nightly backup of the SAN RAID.

This is a good read for shared environments. Hope it helps and good luck.

www.10dot1.co.uk/guides

Or cantemo.com/fcpx.html

Cantemo is definitely on the radar, the cost for that though is not really in the budget just yet.

It certainly seems with FCPX 10.1 there are certainly even more ways to skin a cat, which is good and bad at the same time!

Cheers

Our SAN is connected via 1gig ethernet not Fibre, so yes strictly not a SAN it's just an NFS server, it's old and slow, so the extra cost of installing Fibre with a new SAN from Smalltree, plus TBolt PCI boxes is what is making me chew the fat on alternate workflows.

SAN is fibre. You're on simple Ethernet, not SAN, in the traditional sense. Small Tree can get more speed out of your Ethernet. What exactly is your NAS unit? (brand, model, etc)

Yup I know in the traditional sense it's not a SAN it's just a mental shortcut because I used to work at a place that had XSANs...

As for the unit here currently it's a GB Labs Space unit, NFS and 1gb Ethernet.