Laurent Wandrebeck wrote: . . > A centralized storage solution is impossible due to our (awfully) low IT budget. I'm used to that. "We need this, this, this and that. Here's a dollar." > Only important data is backuped (/home and a couple other things), as > we can't afford to save several TB. > 3 servers are rack ones, others are towers. > A bit of history: when I get employed there, we had 400GB, 1 box per > user, 100mbps network, local user accounts...we are now at 30+TB, > twice more boxes than users... Everytime we had to work on a new > satellite, generally a new box came in and was dedicated to store and > process data of this new sat. > Everytime, it was a noname box, with classical hardware and a 3ware > card (sometimes, I even had to use software raid *sigh*). We're always I rather enjoy using SW raid. > close to full capacity, and work in emergency is my daily companion > (as I'm the only IT guy, having to do lots of things others than > admin) > Disks are, depending on the box, from 200GB to 1TB, 4 up to 24 ones. > raid is mostly 5, 10 on a couple others (home server, db server) > I know the way it was deployed isn't the best, unfortunately, > struggling with low time and budget, it was difficult to do it a > different way. Kinda what I figured - a conglomeration of stuff. Sounds like a situation I'd find myself in. Actually, I kinda like it. Anyway, how about collapsing your storage down to a few roll-your-own NFS servers? Perhaps the smaller boxes could easily be moved to one server, the heavy hitters left as is & the medium boxes folded into 2-3 servers. That said, NFS server performance on generic hardware & Linux always seems to be somewhat of an issue. While I'm not a huge fan of Sun, a few OpenSolaris boxes with ZFS could be quite nifty. With the only resources being myself & (relatively) inexpensive generic HW, that would be my approach. -- tkb