[lug] Cheap centralized storage

[Orion Poplawski]

I'm looking for suggestions for inexpensive centralized disk storage 
solutions.  I'm working for a scientific research company that uses a fair 
amount of disk space, though not huge by some measures.  About 3.5 TB is in 
place right now, distributed among many machines and NFS automounted on 
demand.  This situation is tolerable, and it allows one to distribute cheap 
IDE disks in various machines.

If possible though, I'd like to consider moving to a more centralized 
solution which might provide easier management and tape backup.  However, it 
seems that most mid- to large- scale SCSI systems are quite expensive.  And 
IDE seems limited in the amount of disks supported in a single machine, at 
least until serial-ATA is in production.

Any thoughts?  Are there server motherboards out there with "lots" of IDE 
interfaces?  Other cheap drive interfaces (FW? USB 2.0?) to look at?

- Orion