[luau] storage - need raid?

[Dwight]

Like any good question, the answer is "it depends."

Some of the things you should ask yourself are:

- how much uptime/reliability do the end-users want/require?  greater
reliability = greater cost
- how will the storage be used?  transaction intensive applications or
primarily static files?
- who will support the disk?  are you going to do it by yourself or do you
want someone else to handle it for you?  outsourced support = greater cost

Answering these questions will help you narrow down your search.  If the
users don't require five nines for uptime/reliability, then you can get away
with running a roboust Linux server outfitted with a SCSI based RAID array
serving files via both SAMBA and NFS.  If the storage is critical, then you
might want to talk to someone at HONCAD or elsewhere about what you can do
(HONCAD was selling NetApp boxes that were previously leased to Square...see
the HONCAD website).

My $0.02.

Dwight...

-----Original Message-----
From: luau-admin at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
[mailto:luau-admin at videl.ics.hawaii.edu]On Behalf Of TB
Sent: Thursday, September 25, 2003 12:58 PM
To: luau
Subject: [luau] storage - need raid?


I need storage for about 40 users x about 10 gigs
each, so 400 gigs or more. I'm unfortunately utterly
ignorant in this area. I've googled around & found
some very expensive raid array solutions. My budget is
around $1500. I have a mixed lab of PCs running w2k
and SGs running IRIX (plus some servers running
Redhat), kind of a shoe-string operation in the UH art
dept. Users want to log in & access their space from
any workstation.

What sort of google search should I do to get up to
speed in this area? Should I just buy a cheap PC & put
two big hard drives in it & share with NFS & samba?

NFS, samba, webdav, other?

scsi or IDE?

homemade raid?

How to evaluate reliability? There are a lot of issues
here I haven't had to deal with before.

All help appreciated.

TDB
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