Re: hardware

[Gilles Mocellin <gilles.mocellin@free.fr>]

Le Thursday 21 April 2011 13:29:23 shawn wilson, vous avez écrit :
[...]
> now, i am (obviously) considering building a sub-$1k san. what i'm
> wondering if if there are any better or cheaper options? it would be
> real nice if, instead of spending $900 + (big ass) power supply +
> disks, i could buy tons of cheap consumer hardware and do internal
> software raid and then some type of network raid and spend that money
> on 4 or so servers that had ~4 bays and have (even smaler / cheaper)
> redundant servers saying, get those few bits from server 1, then those
> few bits from server 2, etc. since this would require fast switching,
> i suppose such a think would run mainly on a network layer.
> 
> i understand that these are some of the features of nfs4 / pnfs.
> however, i was wondering if there was any way to do this currently
> (with semi-stable software)?
> 
> also, are there any *free* / open source low delta replication
> solutions yet? lastly, is there any project for doing san stuff with
> consumer hardware? (last i checked freenas looked more of a joke to
> me)

[...]

I'd say you can look at some distributed filesystems.
I was looking lately at glusterfs and moosefs.

MooseFS is simpler to setup, and despite lake of High Availibillity of the 
metada server, it will soon be a good choice.

In log term, I hope Ceph (already in upstream kernel) will be the real one.

Please, report back if you make some tests !