Mike,
For the RAID part of the equation I would strongly recommend the Apple
Xserve RAID. Its the cheapest (reputable) RAID solution that I'm aware
of, and I have three of them in active use without experiencing any
horrible problems. I think one disk has failed so far, but thats par for
the course.
They work fine in Solaris; the fibre channel card that Apple sells is
the cheapest that you'll find, and is secretly an LSI card that has good
Solaris drivers. The administration is all done over the network with a
Java application, which is a refreshing change from vendors like
Clariion who required crazy serial cables and Solaris 2.5.1 applications.
If you go that route, I would recommend getting the extra cache and
battery modules; the spare parts kit is also a good idea.
As far as the servers go, someone else on the list probably has a better
idea of how the SPARC servers scale (I use AMD64 ones). I would think
getting 3-4 V240 systems would work well. You could move one of the
280R's to act as a home directory server and keep the other one in the
Sun Ray pool. I don't personally think much of using workstations like
the Blade 2000 for server purposes (and home directories are pretty
important).
Don't forget to check the educational promotions; the V210, V240 and
V440 all have deals. The V240 seems to be the sweet spot in my opinion,
the "large" configuration is $5900 (so 3 servers and 1 RAID unit
configuration would be around $25,700 total).
--
Simon Kuhn
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