Home-built vs. xServe RAID (7TB)

[TeeJayHoward]

I was reading this article on the 4 million dollar petabyte array, and noticed a comment someone posted:

30. Re: Post #9, rsteck, man you are sure getting ripped off for 3 TB at $10k. You can get 3.5TB from Apple for $8.5k retail (let alone any discount that your sales rep might be able to get your company). Heck, if you have a real good sales rep and you buy a lot of equipment, you can get the 7TB version for about $10.5k-$11k...

This seemed a bit high to me. 7TB for 10.5-11K? (It's closer to 12-13K on the apple store). I was wondering what the advantage is to purchasing something like this from apple instead of building it yourself. Would it be faster? Is it really cheaper? I headed over to MonarchComputer and priced out a similar setup. 3U, 15x 500GB drives, and I'm an AMD nut, so it had to be an opteron setup

$904.00 Supermicro SC933t-R760
$730.71 3Ware 9550SX-16ML Controller
$357.71 Seagate ST3500641AS 500 GB (x15 = $5,365.65)
$265.74 Tyan S2882G3NR (Thunder K8S)
$158.00 AMD Opteron 240
$108.67 1 GB DDR-333REG ECC Low Profile
___________________________________________________
$7532.77 Total

I'm not aware of the kind of processor or memory used in the xServe RAID, but I'm assuming it's comparable. I guess my question is this - Why are the Apple products selling so well? Is the extra 3 grand going towards tech support or something? Or is it because their cases are so shiny-pretty? Is there any sort of performance benefit to using the Apple setup?

(On a side note, I like the xServe RAIDs. They're purdy.)

 

[Lazn_Work]

Actually you are looking at that all wrong.

The xServe Raid doesn't even have a processor per say, it is basically just an ATA -> fibre channel SAN device.

What it does is hook up to your server(s) (any OS/CPU you want) via 2Gb Fibre Channel and shows up as however you configure the drives. (the RAID logic is invisible to the server) So you could use 4 of the drives in RAID 10 and the other 10 drives in RAID 5 and it would show it self to the server(s) as two logical drives, one fast one, one huge one.

Really SANs are very cool and let you do all kinds of fun stuff (like clustering) that local storage in a server (what you homebuilt) can never do, and it makes life easier in large environments.

==>Lazn

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Oh.

Thanks for pointing that out. I feel like a complete fool now.

 

[Lazn_Work]

No worries, it is an easy mistake to make. If you don't need the features of a SAN, then yes any SAN is way overpriced.

==>Lazn

 

[roberttran]

There is a SAN at work and that thing is monster!
Last month we added 7TB of more storage to it and it started alarming this week about low free space, haha! Silly SAP developers

-Robert

 

[liquidtrance123]

There is a SAN at work and that thing is monster!
Last month we added 7TB of more storage to it and it started alarming this week about low free space, haha! Silly SAP developers

-Robert

Every place i've worked that decided to get a SAN had it 75% full before it went live.

 

[draksia]

My advice DON'T get Seagate 500gb Nearlines or the 7200.9 we are having massive problems with them timing out when used in external enclosures here at work. I can get a set to run more then about 12 hours before a failure.

You are much better off getting something like this

http://www.nstor.com/default.asp?bdy=/product/sata/4700_ov.asp

It has properly designed with respect to cooling, signal integrity, power supplies. It is generally a much better option then building your own. Plus you have real tech support engineers to talk to when things go wrong and if it for a company then they blame the manufacture not you when it does break.

Also if you really want 500gb drives I recomend getting the Hitachi's they seem to work alot better.