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
> 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:

The combination definitely looks attractive. I have only been hearing
positive things about the Areca cards; the overall combination sounds
pretty attractive.

> 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.

Another "usage model" that could be appropriate would be
ATA-over-Ethernet...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA-over-Ethernet>

> 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.

We're thinking about some stuff like this to host things that require
bulky amounts of disk that are otherwise "not high TPC" sorts of apps.
This is definitely not a "gold plated" answer, compared to the NetApp
and EMC boxes of the world, but can be useful in contexts where they
are too expensive.
--
let name="cbbrowne" and tld="gmail.com" in String.concat "@" [name;tld];;
http://linuxdatabases.info/info/x.html
It is usually a good idea to put a capacitor of a few microfarads
across the output, as shown.