Just finished building one, actually a few of them. Started with a base of the IBM xSeries (360). Got it loaded with their RAID controllers, and also got the expansion chassis for the drives. The cost wasn't that high, but we get educational pricing from IBM. We also buy a LOT of stuff from them.
Each expansion chassis holds 14 drives, arranged in two blocks of 7. Each block is its own (hardware) RAID 5 controller. The last unit I built has two expansion chassis filled with 73GB drives. The 140GB should be available sometime in the next few months. Go install distro of choice (we use Debian for servers), then install LVM (Linux Volume Manager - http://www.sistina.com/products_lvm.htm). LVM lets you create and resize partitions which can span physical disks or RAID slices. I've been doing a lot of work with Veritas under Solaris, which does pretty much the same thing. The biggest difference between the two is that Veritas (and VxFS) can resize the filesystem on the fly, while LVM and the ext2 resize tool requires the filesystem be offline. Not that big a problem as it's a lot easier than repartitioning/reformatting. So far, we've got a 1.6TB system, and another one that's 4.5TB and can be expanded to about 9TB (this is all available space after you lose your RAID5/ext3 data). Once that's set up, you can configure NFS and Samba to share the partitions wherever you want. -Mark On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 02:29:49PM -0400, Andrew W. Gaunt wrote: > > I'm in the very preliminary stages of looking into the > possibilty of replacing a proprietary file server we have > that is rather expensive and difficult to work with. > > Without going into too much detail, its replacement must > be able to deliver data via NFS and SMB. Samba is just fine > for the latter. Also, it must be maintainable (no proprietary > secrets that only the vendor's wizards know and can't reveal), > reliable, scalable, blah blah.. Something in the Terabyte size > for starters. It will need to serve hundreds of Solaris/Windows > clients with the occasional linux box (they are growing in > number, however). > > > Any suggestions as to what projects or vendors I might read up on? > > > -- > ____ __ > | 0|___||. Andrew Gaunt *nix Sys. Admin., etc. > _| _| : : } [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www-cde.mv.lucent.com/~quantum > -(O)-==-o\ [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://www.gaunt.org > _______________________________________________ > gnhlug-discuss mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
