Faster than 10 gigabit etherner!? With much lower protocol overhead!? The word is true. This thing is an LSI raid controller in a box, with SSD caching capabilities and a 4-port thunderbolt interface.
4 thunderbolt ports?! Wait, you mean I can connect this thing to up to 4 computers, via thunderbolt? Yep, that's right. 20 gigabit thunderbolt with transfers exceeding 1 gigabyte per second in real-world performance.
Maybe I don't understand something, but it looks like crap. 1. Single controller with a write-back cache but WITHOUT A BATTERY OR SC? 2. SATA drives. Yeah, right, it's for video, sequential IO only... the problem is, it will become fragmented sooner or later, and your sequential IO will become random. Will you update a video a year later with iops/latency/throughput results? 3. Single path connection for expansion shelves. That's just asking for trouble. 4. Is path redundancy even possible? Oh well, stupid question: no controller redundancy anyway. Is there a dual-controller version? If there is, how is path redundancy implemented for it? 5. Java-based GUI as an in-band management. OK, while I hate Java, everyone uses it and it's mostly good enough (except when each and every different storage you manage requires a different JRE version). But in-band? Their UG is awesome: "Thunderbolt 2.0 x 4, the bandwidth of each port is 2000GB/s". Also, a pony puking with rainbows with every purchase. =)
OK, maybe not crap, but a VERY niche product.
PS OMFG, it costs 6k$ diskless (http://www.simplynas.com/a16t2-share.aspx). Just... wow.
I would love to see this kind of equipment in action. Could you guys show us a demo of the hardware being used? Also, how many people are going to be on the video editing team anyway? I myself would like to see this stuff in action!
Just to talk about the intended user base which is mainly mac creative users, OSX defrags disks on its own periodically. and you are right this is a VERY Niche product its not intended for genral consumption but the companies website makes that clear.
considering the populated Promise Technologies 4disk thunderbolt 2 with only 8 terabytes cost 1k this does not seam like such a bad price for a much nicer setup.
They do actually make multipath gear with better redundancy, but it is costlier. This is actually a really good low cost option for "Working disks" for big projects shared among a team of 4 editors. While I'd probably have a proper san somewhere else (OMG NO BATTERY ON SAN!? I know right) this is a good setup for working on editor stations. Faster than most fiber channel and 10 gig ethernet, with a lower total cost than kitting out even 10 gig E. I think 10 gig e should be cheaper than it is.. but that is another story.
How is the storage presented to the user? I know you said it had a jbod mode. Does it have an HBA mode so you could deal with the limitations it has with snapshots and write hole by using zfs?
The RAID slicing reminds me of AIX LVM slicing but relative to access times and a middle slice having quicker access times due to the time it takes to move the head. Oh well back to the future.
You lose a lot to protocol overhead. Also the cheaper 10gig cards can't always do 10 gig. Even with jumbo frames the interrupt rate often overwhelms a single core on a cpu and so 10 gig relies on multiple streams. 10 gig isn't really meant for one machine to use all 10 gigs of bandwidth though you could argue the total to disk bandwidth in this cabinet is only around 40 gigabit and you'd have to use faster stuff than sata disks to get there