Building a Large SAN

[Jean-Rene Cormier]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 19:41 -0500, Matt Morgan wrote:
> 
> Dell Powervaults, for example, hold 14 disks, you can attach up to six
> (check me on that--not 100% sure) to one server, and the disks will
> soon be going to 500GB each, I think. So you might reach 42 TB just
> using somewhat regular disk storage.

Last time I checked all Powervaults were for SCA drives and the biggest
SCA drive I've seen is 300GB.

If it was me and money wasn't a problem I would go with some Coraid
arrays like someone already suggested or build my own AOE arrays with a
case from Rackmountpro with the SATA backplane that can hold a lot of
drives with some Promise or 3Ware SATA controller (ones that have a
least 8 ports).

With AOE arrays I believe you can add them as long as you have port free
on your ethernet switch. Though I would be careful not to get in a
situation where if an array goes down because of a power supply failing
or something like that that you don't lose all your data. Just something
to think about...

BTW there was an article about AOE in Linux Journal last June and I
believe they used the Coraid array in there.

-- 
Jean-Rene Cormier <jrc at jrcormier.com>