Thanks for your thoughts. Do you know of a good RAID controller that supports double-ended arrays? Since I live an hour away from work, I don't relish the thought of having to drive back here in the middle of the night if something goes wrong with a home-brew machine. The nice thing about a turnkey operation is that it's someone else's problem, at least if we have a maintenance contract (that's one thing I'm going to *insist* upon, even if Management then says "sorry, we can't afford it." <G>) If nothing else, I know a couple geeks who know more about this stuff than I who can build something like this using Linux.
I suppose I could look at OpenFiler to see how much work it would be.... Hmm... -----Original Message----- From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, October 23, 2009 11:46 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: Home-brew SAN vs name-brand storage appliance On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 11:07 AM, John Aldrich <[email protected]> wrote: > What I like about a SAN ... Remain aware that SAN/NAS aren't magic. The disks and ICs and PCBs and softwae in a SAN aren't fundamentally different than a good general-purpose computer. They have CPU and RAM and NIC, and run some OS internally (maybe Win Storage Server, maybe some *nix, maybe something developed in-house, whatever). The nature of SAN/NAS can be an advantage or a disadvantage. The fact that you're not running anything *but* storage can mean less attack surface and less things to go wrong and more efficient resource utilization, so it can be a win. Or it can end up just being a file server you can't run anything else on. A lot of it comes down to whether you want a turnkey appliance, or something you can use and extend the way you want it. Sometimes DIY yields more flexibility and efficiency; sometimes it's just a pain in the @ss. > ... is that they can and do come with redundant everything, including > controllers, NICs, power supplies, etc. You can get redundant everything in a good general-purpose computer, too. Even the CPUs, although a CPU failure generally means an OS restart. A good NAS/SAN will handle that seamlessly. > My concern is that if I get a server and attach a RAID array to it, > if the RAID controller fails, I'm SOL until I get a replacement > RAID controller. Keep a cold spare (easy), or buy a RAID controller that supports double-ended arrays (complicated, but no downtime for fail over). I emphasize all this because your environment sounds a lot like ours. I've been doing the math for us, and don't see SAN/NAS really being appropriate for us yet. Single-server virtualization is the direction I'm leaning towards. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG - www.avg.com Version: 8.5.423 / Virus Database: 270.14.27/2453 - Release Date: 10/23/09 06:56:00 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
