Afforable Multiple Terabyte Storage Solution for NAS?

E

Eduardo

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Sep 5, 2001
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Is there such a thing? I work for a new media group in Los Angeles using alot of cutting edge technogy, unfortunately we went through our budget with cameras, switchers, and various video streaming technologies, the last thing on the budget was a 16 terrabyte SAN Solution for storing our HD Video with a price Tag of $40,000, today the finance guy say that's too expensive....

So my question, is there a cheaper solution then a SAN or am I gonna have to daisy chain a ton of portable 2 terrabyte GRAIDS?
 
Are you interested in remote storage solutions or does this have to be locally based?

I have several solutions if you are seeking remote storage with dedicated server (this cuts down on your budget massively)
 
building a fileserver with 16x1TB disks on a 16port Raid card would be my guess of the cheapest route to go...
 
Eduardo said:
Is there such a thing? I work for a new media group in Los Angeles using alot of cutting edge technogy, unfortunately we went through our budget with cameras, switchers, and various video streaming technologies, the last thing on the budget was a 16 terrabyte SAN Solution for storing our HD Video with a price Tag of $40,000, today the finance guy say that's too expensive....

So my question, is there a cheaper solution then a SAN or am I gonna have to daisy chain a ton of portable 2 terrabyte GRAIDS?
Click to expand...

What about iSCSI? An iSCSI SAN will provide most of the benefits of FC without the expensive infrastructure. Also, are you using SAS or SATA drives? You should be able to get into a dual controller iSCSI system w/ 16 1TB SAS drives for about 1/3 of that pricepoint.
 
A lot of businesses don't build their production systems, which is why the price point is so high. Yes, you can stuff 16 drives in a stacker case, throw in a consumer grade motherboard, toss it on some cheap gig network with iscsi, and break that price...but when it comes to business production, thats not good enough and not reliable enough.
 
I completely agree. There are many solutions out there (Infortrend, Promise) that offer rack mountable, RAID systems w/ hotswapable redundant components that are hardly a thrown togather system. Just because it doesn't say EMC or HDS on the front doesn't mean it's not more than adequate for an enterprise environment.
 
Eduardo said:
So my question, is there a cheaper solution then a SAN or am I gonna have to daisy chain a ton of portable 2 terrabyte GRAIDS?
Click to expand...

I think you can do this for under $40k, if you can deal with building it yourself. Here's my budget layout for this project:
$1300 Supermicro 846e1 case/power supply/backplane
$4100 20x 1TB ES.2 drives, for bulk storage
$90 2x boot disks
$460 RAID controller, LSI 8708ELP
$150 Battery backup unit for raid controller
$910 Motherboard, one processor, 8gb of memory (two sets).

There are some other misc things you will need (a SAS cable, for example), and this build is not for beginners. $7000 worth of hardware is nothing to sneeze at, and it'll probably take another $300 worth of parts to get a real working system out of this. But a 2x10 disk raid 60 will perform a heck of a lot better than some USB/Firewire disks.

All of that said: I suggest you look at Dell's direct-attached storage options. An MD1000 fully loaded with 1tb disks is only $10k, and it has a warranty. If you decide to build it yourself, and can't get it working, or some critical part fails, you're pretty much SOL. Dell has some chance of fixing the problem.
 
A SAN is not a NAS and does a whole lot more than a NAS.. Which do you need?

A multi terrabyte NAS is pretty easy to do as shown by others here, and even a multi Terrabyte OpenFiler iSCSI SAN.. But it still isn't up to par with a Compellent or EMC or some other real SAN.

A good SAN will be bootable, clusterable, do snapshots, support clustered servers (different from clustered storage) works on a block level, etc.

Simplified, a NAS is just a dedicated file server.
 
We have quite a bit of emc storage that we would be happy to move out of inventory at a very low price
Maybe we can help out. can email me paul @ bltrading.com
 
I would look into a distributed SAN, generally they are a bit cheaper on the initial investment and you don't have to get the full 16 TB right now
 
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