On Saturday 11 December 2010 18:37 John R Pierce wrote > On 12/11/10 9:29 AM, Rafa Grimán wrote: > > What about a DIY NAS with an off the shelf server and storage array? > > and how do you avoid single-point-of-failure? if that COTS goes down, > your storage is offline, and you've lost any writes in progress. > > enterprise storage has fully redundant *everything*, a dual filer HA > NetApp box will not even blink if any subsystem fails. cached write > data is mirrored in both controllers so if one controller croaks, the > other can flush the buffers for it, and client storage connections > continue without a hiccup. yes, you pay for this. As I said a bit further down in my previous e-mail: you can use GPFS, CXFS, GFS as its filesystem and have redundant hardware. If you want to get a better idea, check out SONAS from IBM. It's basically GPFS + Samba and redundant HW. You get HA, high performance, modularity and flexibility. You can also check out: http://www.redhat.com/magazine/006apr05/features/gfs/ If you don't want to shell out what IBM is going to charge you, you can DIY (if you have the knowledge) or you can hire some Linux consultant that has a good Linux knowledge. HTH Rafa -- "We cannot treat computers as Humans. Computers need love." Happily using KDE 4.5.1 :)