Um... I can buy ten 1TB drives from newegg, get a rack mount raid plus rack and it will still cost less than 5 grand. It wouldn't even be too hard to get working.
This is not the same thing. Your "Rackmount RAID" will probably have redundant power supplies at best and give you a dumb SCSI or SAS interface to the array. This unit has redundant storage processors and redundant IO paths and in addition supports various provisioning methods internally.
Can you still build one yourself? Sure, with a couple of high end (dual Gig-E NIC, fast scsi controlelr) Linux boxes to frontend the thing and act as redundant storage processors you could get there. You also need an extremely intimate knowledge of Linux HA, LVM, iSCSI enterprise target, samba, NFS, etc. and all the time to write software to manage the beast! You might squeeze it in under $5K not considering time, so have fun with that. You would be able to scale it cheaper though I guess.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Um... I can buy ten 1TB drives from newegg, get a rack mount raid plus rack and it will still cost less than 5 grand. It wouldn't even be too hard to get working.
Easy should not mean expensive Hitachi.
This is not the same thing. Your "Rackmount RAID" will probably have redundant power supplies at best and give you a dumb SCSI or SAS interface to the array. This unit has redundant storage processors and redundant IO paths and in addition supports various provisioning methods internally.
Can you still build one yourself? Sure, with a couple of high end (dual Gig-E NIC, fast scsi controlelr) Linux boxes to frontend the thing and act as redundant storage processors you could get there. You also need an extremely intimate knowledge of Linux HA, LVM, iSCSI enterprise target, samba, NFS, etc. and all the time to write software to manage the beast! You might squeeze it in under $5K not considering time, so have fun with that. You would be able to scale it cheaper though I guess.