MDC, SAN, iSCSI on Mac OS X solution Help

Hey All,

I work for a shop that is not primarily a high end video editing company but we do have a video department.

We are trying to get a solution for them.

We have 2 Mac OS X clients using a small tree Gigabit cards to connect over iSCSI to a Dell Equallogic 63 TB SAN. We were using SANMP for volume locking software to avoid corruption. We want to go in a different direction now.

Now, we want to present the SAN volumes to both editors and have them both write at the same time with a file locking system SAN.

I am looking at the following solution:

Connect 2 Macs over iSCSI with ATTO iSCSI initiator's and XSAN to the Dell equallogic SAN through one-single Quantum StorNext Metadata controller installed on a Dell PowerEdge server.

I am also considering ruling out the Stornext completely and using XSAN on a Mac OS X server as an MDC.

All solutions will include a dedicated switch for iSCSI traffic segregated through a VLAN.

How does everyone feel about having no redundancy on a MDC solution? What about support? Can we set this up and then let it go or does it require a large amount of support time?

Any ideas or opinions would be appreciated.