In message 20000815000631.18668.qmail@trail.cimedia.comyou write:
Say huh? For the same money? Even having to buy twice the disks, you'd still most likely end up cheaper than a filer. If this isn't the case for you, I want in on that discount.
..Depends a lot on who you're buying your disk from and what features you want, I think..
At my place of business, we were recently deciding between EMC and NetApp.
We wanted: Protected Data (RAID) Snapshots Off-line Backups Remote Mirroring
In EMC Land, where the only way to get more features is to buy more mirrors, we had: Copy 1 - The Original Data Copy 2 - A mirror of the data Copy 3 - A BCV of the data for rapid recovery Copy 4 - A BCV of the data for offline backups Copy 5 - A BCV for SRDF mirroring to a remote site
Copy 6 - A BCV for receiving SRDF from the primary site Copy 7 - The live data Copy 8 - A mirror of the data
That's 8 TBs of disk on the floor for 1 usable TB of storage.
There's no way you'd get two filers with X diskspace between them for anywhere near the price of some cheaper DAS with X diskspace, unless that DAS you're talking about is an EMC or something like that.
Okay, we were also deciding between putting up another NT fileserver with ~200 gigs usable and an F740 with ~200gigs usable.
The head unit for the F740 was about $10k more than a Compaq DL380, however the disk with shelves was about $1,000 _cheaper_ than the dumb shelves Compaq was trying to sell us.
So it's a tad more expensive, but the extra features of the NetApp pushed it over the top.
-James