We have installed a SAN solution at a university in Sweden based on the IBM FASTt 700. We knew that there wasn't any support for Macintosh servers connected to the FASTt 700 when we installed it but how are things today?
I have found that there is a company http://www.attotech.com/sans.html that has a SAN solution for Macintosh but are there any companies that offer a SAN solution for a mixed environment?
Requires Free Membership to View
When you register for SearchStorage.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics, the latest news and the biggest challenges you face as a storage professional today.
Rich Castagna, Editorial Director
Practically all of the major storage vendors support mixed environments. It's usually up to the OS vendor to support Fibre Channel in the OS. The new OSX operating system from Apple, since it is a variant of Unix, can do Fibre Channel.
The HBA vendors are the folks who write the OS drivers for their cards. It may be a benefit to you to peruse the HBA vendor Web sites and look for a driver for MAC that can be used with their HBA. Storage vendor support is another matter. MAC support has been lacking in the industry due to lack of support in the OS. This is starting to change.
Keep checking with your storage vendor on whether they will be including support for the MAC in the future.
Chris
Editor's note: Do you agree with this expert's response? If you have more to share, post it in one of our .bphAaR2qhqA^0@/searchstorage>discussion forums.
This was first published in September 2002