[lug] Cheap centralized storage

[Harris, James]

I have done exactly 0 searching on this, but, you might want to look into a
solution like Quantum's SNAP servers.  I'd pimp out Maxtor's MaxAttach, but
that's a dead line, so Quantum's the next best thing.  If they have anything
to compete with the MaxAttach 6000 (over 3TB capacity) you might be able to
get a very serious solution for cheaper than SCSI.  Last I heard, the SNAPs
were Linux powered.

-----Original Message-----
From: Orion Poplawski [mailto:orion at colorado-research.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, October 30, 2002 11:26
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: [lug] Cheap centralized storage

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 
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