On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 09:46:01PM +1000, Amos Shapira wrote: > Hello, > > We have a few PowerEdge 860's which I mostly converted from our > previous-generation Windows based system to Xen hosts for development > on top of CentOS 5 (the production system is now mostly hosted > abroad). > > These servers have space for only two internal disks and I'd like to > try to convert a couple of them into servers of shared storage. > I'm thinking of just setting them up to sync their disks using DRBD > and providing access to the rest of the network via iSCSI. > > I'm looking for a way to attach lots of disks to them. So far the only > options I found are MD1000/3000 from Dell, which are a bit too > expensive for such a side-project. > > Is there another economical (and sane, speed-wise) way to get lots of > disks on these system's bus? > > Thanks,
How sane does the speed have to be exactly? :-) If the answer is not completely insanse then you could add a lot of esata/usb disks externally. If you run out of sata or usb, add more via pci cards. You might not get sata speeds as you might saturate the pci bus well before hitting the sata limit. If you want a little more speed (well, lower latency perhaps) at the cost of reliability you could raid0 them. BTW, an alternative to iSCSI might be ATA over ethernet. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
