Sorin Srbu wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: centos-bounces@centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces@centos.org] On Behalf
Of
Les Mikesell Sent: Wednesday, July 02, 2008 3:32 AM To: CentOS mailing list Subject: Re: [CentOS] settings up cheap a NAS / SAN server, is it possible?
Sorin Srbu wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
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.
Sounds awfully expensive. True?
Most of them are, but you can add whole shelves of disks. I'm not sure it matters so much in a case that holds six drives that you fill from the start and then have nowhere to grow anyway.
The guy who initially asked, IIRC, wanted some 3-4TB storage. This can be accomplished easily with a regular mid/maxi-size tower and a handful of 1TB-SATA drives. Even the midsize oldish Compucase-case I have at home can fit four 3,5"-drives in the hd-cage and another four in the 5,25"-bays. Suppose you fill that case with 1TB-drives and you have 8TB available. My argument is that there is no explicit need for the hardware you mention, despite how sexy it sounds. 8-)
My understanding was that he wanted some kind mid-level kind of storage solution based on hw he already had and not sink the entire budget on a roomful of EMC etc hardware. OTOH, this discussion has been a bit sidetracked since the beginning. 8-)
Hi Sorin,
You're quite right with what you say. I have a 2U chassis already, with a Gigabyte motherboard + 2GB RAM + Core 2 Duo E7650. I also have a few 160GB SATA HDD's laying around, but they're too small. So, I'll be option to put 6 (if I can get the HDD cages fitted into the chassis) 1TB HDD's into it instead, which with RAID 10 will give me 3TB space.
Thus, I don't want to spend more money to buy new equipment if I have this already.
Using CentOS is preferred since I know it the best. I haven't used FreeBSD since v4.7 ( I think I had a look @ 4.9 & 5.4 as well), and I don't know Solaris. I think my action plan now will be to figure out how to install CentOS on a USB memory stick and make it boot on any machine (making it easy to replace if need be), and then to play around with the RAID a bit and see how well it works.