I don't like netapp. I had to deal with their products a few years ago in a combined linux/XP environment, and there were unsolveable problems. AFAIK, it related to the ownership and permissions that Linux users would see for files created in XP environment.
I then bought a generic PC motherboard and CPU, and a stack of SATA drives and set it up as RAID with LVM. This was kept on a UPS in an air-conditioned room. It worked well until something went wrong with the AC, and drives failed and the system shut down. I had a spare, and that was good, and the RAID helped, but after that I had two more drive failures within a month. So the upshot of this is: don't let the AC fail. Or maybe, that you can't combine cheap hardware with an AC failure (the much hated netapp was in the same room and survived the heat). I had a server, and HP LP1000R, that is built like a tank. Slow and old by today's stanards, being a dual Xenon at 1.27 Ghz, but it had 2GB of parity ram, and three 15K seagate SCSI3 (? I can't remember the SCSI tech for sure) drives, hot swappable, and I was able to get a fourth to swap. The problem is they were only 36GB each. Oh, the machine had a very complex hardware RAID, so I had two 36GB drives in one 72GB volume and a parity drive. This machine was great...it was very fast, very reliable...I mean very reliable. Even outside of AC and without a UPS it never had a single failure in the five years I had it in operation. I wonder if it might be worthwhile getting a bunch of machines, perhaps not this old but using the best USED SCSI drives. These industrial-strength drives seems to be far better quality than the latest amazing capacity consumer drives. The disadvantages are going to be higher electricity usage and taking more space. _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
