From: Stephen D. Williams (sdw@lig.net)
Date: Thu Dec 28 2000 - 19:29:51 PST
Strata Rose Chalup wrote:
...
> > [...]
> > We're not talking about doing things twice as cheap as NetApp and EMC,
> > we're talking about doing things an order of magnitude cheaper... and
> > starting with an initially different market at lower-cost price point.
>
> Right. Remember the little $125 - $250 boxes that you could hook onto
> any printer to magically make it a network-enabled, no host required
> printer? Who's working on one of those, with a teensy bit more smarts
> (not much!) to hook up to an N-bay standalone drive case for cheap home
> and small office RAID? Bzzt! Not here yet!
First, both Maxtor MaxAttach and Quantum Snap (Maxtor's swallowing Quantum)
provide true stripped down appliance level storage. Just plug and play with
an embedded controller. A bit overpriced however at the retail level.
Second, RaidZone has a nice great story compared to the traditional big boys
of network attached storage arrays. They use a card with many high-speed IDE
controllers to allow them to build RAID-0/1/5 boxes with up to a terabyte or
more of storage dirt cheap. If I had to manage a lot of storage, I would at
least look at these.
I do know however that the higher-end storage arrays like EMC units include
solid state staged storage and other accelerators. In a true performance
situation where money is no object, EMC would be a reasonable choice. In a
more flexible performance environment, I'd try the cheap stuff. While the
performance sophistication could fairly easily be duplicated, there is little
reason for the open development community to persue it that much when we can
buy 82GB drives so cheaply.
The one innovation that I'm surprised is still missing from Linux is support
for 'snapshot' block device driver modes to allow online backups. I'd really
like to write a pseudo-block driver to handle it, but I'll wait until the
kernel settles and hope that someone else will tackle it.
BTW, ReiserFS works great as a better, faster, more efficient FS that is also
journaled well.
...>
> Cheers,
> _Strata
>
> >
> > ----
> > Adam@KnowNow.Com
> >
> > We don't do drivebys, we park in front of houses and shoot.
> > -- Eminem, "Amityville"
>
> --
> ========================================================================
> Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ] strata "@" virtual.net
> VirtualNet Consulting http://www.virtual.net/
> ** Project Management & Architecture for ISP/ASP Systems Integration **
> =========================================================================
sdw
-- sdw@lig.net sdw@insta.com swilliams@Jabber.com Stephen D. Williams Insta, Inc./Jabber.Com, Inc./CCI http://sdw.st 43392 Wayside Cir,Ashburn,VA 20147-4622 703-724-0118W 703-995-0407Fax Dec2000
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