Cost Effective Mass Disk Storage

[Justin Hannan]

I'm looking at setting up a large cost effective storage system and wonder if anyone has any ideas/improvements on the below.

Looking at a DL360 & MSA20 (12 x 500GB) solution for 5+TB of storage. Ideally 10+TB per unit.

I've been trying to find info on the HP site about how many MSA20's I can attach to a single server, using a SA6404 I'm thinking I could attach upto 4 MSA20 (3 possibly if I stick the internal DL360 disks on a channel)?

Going the MSA1500 route seems a little expensive.

One critical point is the storage needs to be presented to the O/S (Windows 2003) as one volume (RAID5 -> n 2TB logical volumes -> spanned GPT volume)

Thanks

J

[Andy_180]

Justin, with a DL360 you have to use the embedded controller. Further, you may want to consider an MSA50.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/12245_na/12245_na.HTML

--Andy

[Justin Hannan]

Thanks for the MSA50 link Andy, that could be a possibility.

Although DL360 has a full length pci-x slot I believe, enough for the SA640x.

Regards

Justin

[Andy_180]

correct, it does have a full length PCI slot. 2 as a matter of fact. but as far as the boot array is concearned, you are stuck with using the embedded. at least as far as I know. thanks!
--Andy

[Pat Obrien_1]

Large is relative. Have you thought about a san? Up front investment for hba's and switch, and then there is a pleatheura of components to add for the different tier levels of storage you may want to consider.

[Justin Hannan]

Hi Pat

Yes, we already have infrastucture in place for some Xyratex storage (NetApp R200 enclosures before NetApp get their hands on it). But even with an existing FC SAN setup it works out cheaper (~£1-2k per unit) going the MSA20 route than just adding JBODS on.

Regards

Justin

[Alzhy]

I think what you are planning should work and be more cost-effective than the MSA1500 route. I actually use the same approach for my NAS boxen - I've built a couple over the last few years but unfortunately using "commodity" components - not branded ones.

I use either Linux or Solaris as my NAS/Fileserver O.S.