Laurent Wandrebeck wrote: . .
A centralized storage solution is impossible due to our (awfully) low IT budget.
I'm used to that. "We need this, this, this and that. Here's a dollar."
Only important data is backuped (/home and a couple other things), as we can't afford to save several TB. 3 servers are rack ones, others are towers. A bit of history: when I get employed there, we had 400GB, 1 box per user, 100mbps network, local user accounts...we are now at 30+TB, twice more boxes than users... Everytime we had to work on a new satellite, generally a new box came in and was dedicated to store and process data of this new sat. Everytime, it was a noname box, with classical hardware and a 3ware card (sometimes, I even had to use software raid *sigh*). We're always
I rather enjoy using SW raid.
close to full capacity, and work in emergency is my daily companion (as I'm the only IT guy, having to do lots of things others than admin) Disks are, depending on the box, from 200GB to 1TB, 4 up to 24 ones. raid is mostly 5, 10 on a couple others (home server, db server) I know the way it was deployed isn't the best, unfortunately, struggling with low time and budget, it was difficult to do it a different way.
Kinda what I figured - a conglomeration of stuff. Sounds like a situation I'd find myself in. Actually, I kinda like it.
Anyway, how about collapsing your storage down to a few roll-your-own NFS servers? Perhaps the smaller boxes could easily be moved to one server, the heavy hitters left as is & the medium boxes folded into 2-3 servers.
That said, NFS server performance on generic hardware & Linux always seems to be somewhat of an issue. While I'm not a huge fan of Sun, a few OpenSolaris boxes with ZFS could be quite nifty.
With the only resources being myself & (relatively) inexpensive generic HW, that would be my approach.
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