Honestly, if you can afford it, consier NetApp for the gig anyway. With a Filer you can fibre channel local attach, you can NAS, you can to iSCSI, you can attach it to a SAN. It really will grow with you and your needs over time as you evolve. Its only a cost issue. Consider a FAS270 or something "little" and grow it up over time.

I'm not saying NetApp is the right solution, but don't rule it out, even for this project.

That said, I hear a lot of good things about ATAboy's.

benr.

-----Original Message----- From: owner-toasters@mathworks.com on behalf of Adam McDougall Sent: Mon 3/27/2006 10:45 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Cc: Subject: Direct attached storage needed, slightly offtopic

Not a netapp ;) but I am looking for recommendations for a directly attached raid shelf that uses scsi disks and has a capacity of around 1 T. We dont need much space at all but I want enough disks to make a raid5 make sense. 7 or less 72gb disks would be ideal, but have enough slots for future expansion. I am looking for something that is COMPLETELY software independant, has its own network port for sending notices and for configuation (and/or config through serial). I don't want to fool around with software needed on the host system to monitor and/or manage it at all.

Other than being SATA, various Nexsan products look appropriate, but I'm looking for a company that has appropriate products centering on reliability, price, and decent speed. We have not had specific component problems in the past, so I'm not sure dual controllers, cables etc would help, simply isolated or chronic quirkyness with medium to disasterous effects. I want something that acts solid and predictable from the moment you first plug it in.

I'm not sure I want to dive into iSCSI yet, or if it would work well in our environment. My concerns with that are client support (Solaris 9, Linux 2.6, FreeBSD 6.x) and what would happen in the case of network drops. We don't have a seperate storage network now.