Good grief it's taken forever to get around to posting our final solution to this thread I started way back in the spring ... post #1, and post #2 ...
So here's what we put together way back in June when we revamped our backup methods to include Disk-to-Disk before spinning backups off to tape.
I decided this time I didn't want to go completely ghetto-tastic like this, but I also didn't want to spend much on just D2D storage space.
Final solution is as follows:
Norco DS-1240 12 bay SATA Storage Array = $681.21 from mwave.com
12 Seagate 750GB Hard Drives = $2855.88 from Ciber.com
3Ware 9650SE-12ML 12 port SATA raid card = $714 from Ciber.com
4 (got one spare) meter long SFF8087 to SFF8470 cables (hard to find!) = $223 from Technical Cable Concepts
For a grand TOTAL of = $4,474.09 for ~8TB of RAID5 storage! Not bad!
Of course when Ed went to install the RAID card we encountered our first snag. The card is PCIe ... none of our servers had PCIe slots! DOH!! Since we had volunteers coming that evening and backups were part of the agenda, I headed off to Best Buy just down the street. My objective - find the cheapest PC with a PCIe slot. I landed a nice Gateway desktop for $484.95 ... Ed slapped Windows Server 2003 on it and then our CommVault Galaxy Express backup software. Our volunteers had a bit of a struggle getting an old SCSI card to work in the Gateway, but after some firmware updates they were successful and got our tape autoloader connected to the box.
Yup, our backup solution consists of a cheap-o Gateway desktop hooked up to a sweet 22 tape IBM autoloader and the Norco storage chassis The best part? It all works way better than I expected ... so good that it's still on my radar as an option for our 50TB project.
Wow, that looks a lot like what we've been looking to do, except I think we're going to pick a Supermicro Chassis CSE-836TQ-R800B and put the PC inside the chassis.
Something else that has popped up on my radar as a cheap-o version that might end up being nearly as functional as our EL PS100E is to build a storage device around Sun's new ZFS filesystem. It's only available in (Open)Solaris and maybe FreeBSD, but touts a feature set very similar to what we find in many of the leading iSCSI platforms. A few links that really got me interested....
http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/7_easy_tips_for_zfs
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/storage/
http://blogs.sun.com/PlasticPixel/entry/build_your_own_multi_terabyte
http://blogs.sun.com/bobp/en_US/entry/fish_n_cifs
Posted by: Bryan Johnson | November 27, 2007 at 08:06 AM