SANmp – Fibre and iSCSI SAN sharing software

Superior performance, versatility and ease-of-use

Highlights

• Supports leading applications like Final Cut Pro, Avid, Adobe Premiere Pro, Pro Tools, Logic Pro and many others...
• Mac OS X, Windows XP/2000/2003 Server Standard
  
• (Windows Vista support coming soon)
• Supports iSCSI and Fibre Channel
• Easy to setup, use and administer
• No server or metadata controller needed
• Password protected – Write Exclusive, Read/Write, Read Only, No Access modes

Every copy of SANmp includes a license for both Mac and PC – you can install it on either platform. You can even install both SANmp versions on a dual-boot computer!

If everyone in your workgroup needs to collaborate on massive projects and easily capture, share and edit Terabytes of media, then SANmp is the software you need. And if you’re still researching storage systems or you need to upgrade an existing one, please look into our preconfigured and customized SAN solutions – we offer complete solutions designed for workgroups of all sizes.

Performance

Other SAN sharing applications – particularly those based on file-level locking – can be complicated to install, configure and maintain. In addition, they may have a serious impact on your SAN’s performance, requiring you to compensate by purchasing more storage hardware than expected. SANmp is based on a model that emphasizes high performance and ease-of-use. This means SANmp doesn’t negatively affect your storage hardware’s performance capabilities, so you don’t have to purchase and maintain additional storage arrays.

“We have considered the options of 'file-level' permissions offered by other manufacturers, but we believe that 'volume-level' is the only stable way we can allow users to work with uncompressed 1080 HD.”

– James Tonkin, Director,
Hangman Studios

Overview

SANmp serves as the interface between you and your storage network. SANmp gives you the tools you need to configure your storage in ways that make sense for your workgroup. For example, you can secure portions of your SAN so that only certain users can access them.

You can also specify that certain users be allowed only read-access to part or all of the shared storage. A backup computer could be given read-only access to all volumes, allowing it to perform scheduled backups.

To access your SAN, users simply launch SANmp and login with their unique ID and password. Users select the desired shared resources from a list and mount them so that they’re available to the operating system. Once mounted, each volume is recognized by the workstation as local storage.

Advanced Features

Project Profiles

SANmp’s project profile feature gives you an easy way to setup your working environment – you can create a profile based on the volumes you’ll need for a particular project. For example, if your editing project requires media clips from three volumes, you can create a profile to automatically mount those three volumes in Read Only mode plus another volume in Write mode for your project file. You can create multiple mounting profiles and even save them to .XML files and share them with other SANmp users in your workgroup.

Write-Exclusive Mounting

This feature enables a user to mount a volume so they are the only user allowed to read from – or write to – the volume at any given time. The Write Exclusive mode helps to protect performance, useful for ingesting video or doing live recording sessions. When the user unmounts the volume, it is again possible for other users to read from (or write to) the volume.

Read/Write Mounting

This feature enables a user to mount a volume so they are the only user allowed to write to the volume at any given time. Other users can still concurrently read from the volume. When this user unmounts the volume, it is again possible for another user to write to the volume.

Read Only Mounting

This enables the user to mount a volume so that they can only read from the volume. Any other user can mount the volume in Write and/or Read mode.

Automation – the SANmp Command Line Interface (CLI)

SANmp’s Command Line Interface enables you to automate the most commonly used SANmp functions. You can write and execute scripts that call upon the CLI to do things like login, mount volumes, copy files, unmount volumes, logout, etc. The CLI offers the ability to automate some of your work by executing commands in batch scripts from both Mac and PC.

File Synchronization

With this function, you can see a file in its current state on a read only volume while another user is writing it. The administrator can define a volume’s synchronization interval or the user can do it manually.

Mount Points

This feature allows Windows users to take advantage of the operating system's Mount Point support. Mount points enable a user to mount a volume to a directory on another volume. This is helpful for certain applications, but most importantly it helps circumvent the finite number of available drive letters in Windows. The opposite of a Mount Point is a Drive Letter Mount, where the OS assigns a letter to a mounted volume.

Integration with postmap

If you have a SAN, it’s nearly certain that you have a huge amount of digital assets to manage. How easily can you find something in all of that storage? Do you and others waste hours searching through millions of files? Then you need postmap – a unique search and management application that can help you instantly locate files throughout your entire storage system – SAN, LAN, CD/DVD and FireWire drives. SANmp integrates neatly with postmap, giving your workgroup the ultimate portal to its digital content.

Background

Why do I need SANmp?

Within traditional “local storage” architectures, a single computer has one or more dedicated hard drives. These disks may be internal or external, but without the assistance of networking software they can’t easily be shared concurrently with other computers. In a typical file-sharing network, a server commonly provides the software that controls the sharing and security of storage resources.

In contrast to a client-server network, each computer in a SAN is connected directly to an array of hard drives. Connected workstations then recognize this array as local storage. But without specialized software like SANmp, each workstation would immediately attempt to claim and utilize the entire storage array exclusively for itself, which would lead to serious problems, much like connecting two computers directly to a single USB drive.

Without software like SANmp controlling access to the storage, it is impossible to share, protect and manage your SAN. SANmp is the specialized software that controls each workstation’s access to the storage.