Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/37786
Thunderbolt-enabled can put two boxes on there and you have dedicated bandwidth or 10 Gigabit in each direction.You can do writing to one and reading to the other, and the performance from one box or the I/O from one box does not impede the perfor- mance on the second.” At the NAB show back in April, Promise introduced SAN- Link, a single-cable solution that provides a dual 4G Fibre Channel link for users to connect to exter- nal Fibre Channel storage or an Xsan network. Each adapter fea- tures full duplex FC ports that au- tomatically detect connection speed and can operate indepen- dently at 1, 2 or 4Gb/s. “It’s a Fibre Channel to Thunderbolt adapter,” ex- plains Harrison. “It allows you access your Fibre Chan- nel devices through a Thunderbolt port, so you can take your MacBook or iMac, plug in a SANLink and then plug in your SAN to the SANLink, and you have access to your SAN via a MacBook Pro, which is some- thing you couldn’t do before.” Promise also has plans to release a JBOD product too. “[It] will be a small form factor,” he explains.“It will be the size of a Mac Mini, and it will hold four 2.5-inch drives.” Promise, says Harrison, it trying to meet the de- mands of professionals who want portable storage. “That was a big message that we heard at NAB.A lot of people were saying this is something that I can take on G-Tech was at NAB with what they called a Thunderbolt “science experiment.” They are currently working on predictable and managed performance of storage.“We let the storage vendor handle things like failed drives, but we want to be able to make sure that all the client machines attached to that storage are going to get the kind of bandwidth that they expect,” Rodriguez explains. “From our standpoint, the interconnect doesn’t re- ally matter, as long as the interconnect is capable of de- livering data at the rate that the customer is looking for. We’ll have to see, once we can get some samples, how well it is going to work for realtime HD or realtime 2K. The most interesting thing about [Thunderbolt] is the theoretical ability to do editing from a laptop.” As for Thunderbolt’s broader potential, Rodriguez hopes to see it adopted by PC manufacturers. “Intel is the go for use with a MacBook Pro; design studios, espe- cially the small and medium sized, where you have edi- tors and multimedia professionals that need to have local storage for their MacBook or their iMac; for those that want to do ingest, edit and playback as well.” BRIGHT TECHNOLOGIES Reno, NV’s Bright Technologies (www.4bright.com) is a software company that provides media file servers, such as the BrightDrive, that are specifically designed to meet the needs of media file-based workflows. “We are not a hardware manufacturer,” says com- pany president/chief architect, Ed Rodriguez,“we are a software manufacturer.The same way we operate over Fibre Channel [and] InfiniBand,we’ll do the same thing with Thunderbolt, although I have not received any Thunderbolt-enabled storage yet, so I can’t say for sure what the performance is going to be.” Bright’s software has been developed to maintain 26 Post • July 2011 www.postmagazine.com Bright’s software helps manage storage. They intend to operate over Thunderbolt like they do FC and InfiniBand. claiming that they are going to start putting it on their chipset,” he notes. “I don’t know. I was kind of disap- pointed with the limitations of FireWire and it only being well supported on the Mac side. It would be re- ally big if Thunderbolt were equally well supported on the PC side.” LACIE Back in February, LaCie (www.LaCie.com) intro- duced its first Thunderbolt product — the Little Big Disk — which is designed to store large audio and video files, and provide ultra-fast data transfer, system back up, and content editing performance. At press time, the company was just a few weeks away from delivering the Little Big Disk, and by this printing, it’s expected to be available.