Re: SAN/NAS options

Following up to myself again...

On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> Supermicro 1U w/SCA backplane and 4 bays
> 2x2.8 GHz Xeons
> Adaptec 2015S "zero channel" RAID card

I don't want to throw away the four machines like that that we have. I do
want to throw away the ZCR cards... :) If I ditch those I still have a 1U
box with a U320 scsi plug on the back.

I'm vaguely considering pairing these two devices:

http://www.areca.us/products/html/products.htm

That's an Areca 16 channel SATA II (I haven't even read up on what's new
in SATA II) RAID controller with an optional U320 SCSI daughter card to
connect to the host(s).

http://www.chenbro.com.tw/Chenbro_Special/RM321.php

How can I turn that box down? Those people in the picture look very
excited about it? Seriously though, it looks like an interesting and
economical pairing that gives me most of what I'm looking for:

-a modern RAID engine
-small form factor
-remote management of the array
-ability to reuse my current db hosts that are disk-bound

Disadvantages:

-only 1 or 2 hosts per box
-more difficult to move storage from host to host (compared to a SAN or
NAS system)
-no fancy NetApp features like snapshots
-I have no experience with Areca SATA->SCSI RAID controllers

Any thoughts on this? The controller looks to be about $1500, the
enclosure about $400, and the drives are no great mystery, cost would
depend on what total capacity I'm looking for.

Our initial plan is to set one up for storage for a mail archive project,
and to also have a host use this storage to host replicated copies of all
Postgres databases. If things look good, we'd start moving our main PG
hosts to use a similar RAID box.

Thanks,

Charles