Kurt Keville wrote: > I have been following this dialogue at various locations... like > http://openstoragepod.org/ ... it is remarkable how cheap DIY NAS is > getting...
Thanks for the link. It says they were inspired by the Backblaze project. For those not familiar, Backblaze is in the business of providing online storage, and they published the plans for the low-cost petabyte storage servers they used internally: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ This is great to see, and I've looked into some of the components they use, like the SATA port multiplier backplanes, but Backblaze and OpenStoragePod are interested in solving the problem for petabyte-scale storage, which is an order of magnitude (or two or three) beyond what I'm interested in at the moment. I had hoped to see multiple vendors start offering the SATA backplanes, but years later the item is still hard to find. Compared to the enterprise alternatives, a Backblaze is a bargain, but much of it doesn't scale down cost effectively to 6 ~ 12 drives. They paid $748 for their steel enclosure alone. A smaller one would obviously cost less, but any custom enclosure is going to run $200+. What's on the market for small-scale NASs is already cheap by enterprise standards. But there is still a noticeable "server tax" on these small system. At least some of it is justifiable due to lower volumes. So it is a harder problem to solve. -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@blu.org http://blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
