On 12/13/05, Matt Morgan <minxmertzmomo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 12/13/05, Brian D. McGrew <brian@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Good morning all: > > > > So we've got this recording studio and we've got somewhere around 200 > > external hard drives ranging in size between 100GB and 300GB. When an > > artist comes in, we plug their drive into the host, do the recording, > > save it, unplug it and it's on to the next one. We've never had a drive > > fail until yesterday and fortunately, I was able to quickly recover it > > but it got me to thinking... > > > > What are the prospects of building a SAN to mirror data on to? Since > > everything else in the studio is rack mount, rack space isn't an issue > > but I have two requirements that need to be addressed: > > > > 1) Has to run Linux and be highly and quickly scalable so that I can > > just plug in a drive, add it to an array and go. I figure right now, > > we're close to about 20B and add another 1TB a month. > > > > 2) My main requirement is that I be able to seamlessly and on-the-fly > > clone the drives that we attach to the host. The host is running Mac OS > > 10.3 so Samba or rsync might work. > > I've been using unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) > lately, rather than rsync. You don't really need it, since it's > two-way and you're going one-way, but it's kind of easier to use than > rsync so you might want to look into it. There are packages in extras > and it's available for CentOS, too, which I saw was already > recommended (in its OpenFiler form) in another post. oops, I meant to add that at the scale you're talking about, NAS or SAN may not be necessary--you can get DAS (Direct Attached Storage--that is, regular hard disks) at that scale, and it tends to be cheaper (although OpenFiler is free of course). Dell Powervaults, for example, hold 14 disks, you can attach up to six (check me on that--not 100% sure) to one server, and the disks will soon be going to 500GB each, I think. So you might reach 42 TB just using somewhat regular disk storage.
