MIkey wrote:
I wasn't really referring to servers by the way, something like NAS devices would probably be cheaper... Somewhat of a poor man's san.
I really like this discussion since I struggled with it for an entire month at the end of last year so don't take my nitpicking as personal. :-) You can probably tell which way I went, but I'd really like to see if their are things I didn't consider. Also I really like to see numbers since statement like "A NAS is cheaper" might be true, but saying "A NAS is $x from xxx.com" is a much better statement and at this scale it's all about your spreadsheet-fu.
Running through the Dell storage page you end up spending $20k (list) for their 12 SATA drive NAS device w/ 3year NBD, dual PS, etc. RAID 6 it up and you've got 5TB usable. I'm sure there are cheaper options (feel free to point them out), but I don't think you're going to save that much over going directly to an iSCSI/NFS SAN with a second or third tier vendor... ie not Netapp or EMC. And you've got to manage x number of boxes, don't get volume management, snapshots, etc, and still have to shuffle data around manually for backups or at least hot storage.
How about the question, "Is losing 20% of your data any better than losing 100% of your data?" IMO data loss is data loss whether it's complete or partial. Of course assuming you have backups restoring 20% is easier so it's possible I'm wrong here. I'm still not buying the scenario where managing nine single points of failure is better than managing one. And I think I can eliminate all the single points in a single large system easier then rewriting my application to round robin across 15 data stores that contain partial backups of each other.
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