the new i7 imacs and autodesk smoke?

What i imagine is to build 3 new editing workstations which will roughly be: - fast imac with fusion internal drive and external thunderbolt raid array for video - aja io xt for preview / capturing - software: autodesk smoke & adobe cs6 collection then either; - gigabit networking for getting the material out of the fiber-channel network (dedicated server with fiber-channel connection just for that) - getting some sort of fiber-channel to thunderbolt converter for each machine and connecting directly (problem is this is somehow driver related = all the nodes must have the same version as well ...) This is strictly theoretical, i haven't actually have a chance to test a system like that, basically I'am a bit scared at the thought of giving imacs 100% CPU usage for 20 hours/day...? Thoughts? (mac pro's are not allowed into EU anymore for some reason...) > I'd like to keep all the systems as simple as possible. Are you running a system like that? (What are the pros/cons, is it working as you expected > fast!)

@DanielSB, it is still actual (for me), basically i'll wait for the new mac-pros (however getting into doubts there as well, due to missing expansions). Also decided on the software more or less (smoke 2013 did not made it, although i can still be overvoted ).

No hackintosh for pro stuff. You don't want to deal with that, trust me. It's also not exactly legal AFAIK, which is a no-no for pro work. What kind of SAN are you working with, StorNext or some derivative like XSan? If you're using StorNext you could totally just do DLC, which will run data and metadata all over ethernet. The problem is, you'll be limited to 1 GigE, and best practice is to segregate the two types of traffic across two interfaces if at all possible. If you need more than 1 GigE, I'd get a Thunderbolt Fibre Channel interface, though I haven't personally played with this. The new Mac Pro looks great, but it sounds like a lot of breakout boxes, since everything connects via Thunderbolt. I'm wondering who will come out with a clever solution for managing all that!

No hackitonshes for sure, now about xyzSAN, i was thinking about some sort of nix or osx server bundled with all the possible cards and they can install whatever ****** networking software there, mac's will just see nice "netatalk" folders and can stay pretty much default. I think that will simplify things at the cost of speed.

I don't know enough about the IO demands of smoke / flame, but I imagine you'll be working with high end media, right? Certainly HD ProRes or similar on the low end and maybe 4k DPX on the high end? In either case, I wouldn't try working with any of that stuff over NAS protocols. Inconsistent latency and throughput will probably be dealbreakers. The advantage of a fibre san (or a hybrid fibre / ethernet san) is predictable latency, and extreme flexibility for lun / filesystem configuration. You can probably do most of this with a RAID + software (or pure software ZFS type thing) backend, and an AFP front-end, but I don't know about the latency.