nate wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
This raises an interesting question. What do you do in this kind of scenario? How do you upgrade a NAS / SAN with say 5 / 10 TB worth of data?
Lots of the more modern enterprise arrays support online upgrades. Some of them even support re-distributing data across the new spindles to maximize performance/limit hot spots.
I personally wouldn't want to purchase any storage array that will have important data on it that doesn't have these abilities.
My favorite storage company - 3par has some of the more advanced online optimizations, sample -
http://www.3par.com/documents/3PAR-do-ds-08.0.pdf
Grow data online, convert between RAID levels online, migrate data between spindle types(FC<->SATA) online etc. Create a volume, and you never have to worry about answering the question 'is it really optimal?' because you can change it at any time without application impact or downtime.
nate
Nate, what EXACTLY does that have todo with the topic? We're talking about a self-build NAS / SAN running on Linux (and UNIX), NOT a commercial product