<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> <title></title> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Daniel Karrenberg wrote: <blockquote cite="mid20050907070529.GT821@reifer-karrenberg-net.local" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">[Sorry to be repetitive at the frequency of 1/year] This is experimental data which is immutable once aquired; read: it does not change anyore, ever. It is also not read very often and less so the older it gets. It also needs no high-speed access, we have copies of it in databases for that. The costs of keeping it around are roughly: equipment + ops time. It appears that particular equipment (netapps filer), which is easy to operate, becomes too expensive. It might be a good idea to invest a little ops time in a cheap storage boxes for stuff that does not need filer-quality storage. ATA disks are available at about half a Euro per Gigabute in units of 300GB. Thus it is possible to put up about a Terabyte of storage in any simple Wintel box. Slightly more without redundancy, slightly less with software RAID. Any (old) Wintel box will be fine. The equipment cost will be negligible: EUR600/terabyte if you use old wintel boxes, otherwise add the cost of the simplest wintel box. When building a couple of them and operating them all the same, the ops cost will not be too high. One does not even need RAID. Just build two of them and have a cron job rsyncing between them for full hot redundancy. Name them cheapfiler-1 and cheapfiler-1-copy, make the copy read-only to users. Make as many as we need. Spread them around for physical redundancy. Not rocket science. What's the problem? </pre> </blockquote> I more-or-less agree. For 12000 Euros you can put 11 TB in a rack-mounted box (prices from alternate.nl, a month or so ago):<br> <br> <meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <title></title> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 (Linux)"> <style>  </style> <table border="1" cellspacing="0" cols="6" frame="void" rules="groups"> <colgroup><col width="102"><col width="239"><col width="399"><col width="86"><col width="86"><col width="86"></colgroup> <tbody> <tr> <td align="left" height="16" width="102">Procase</td> <td align="left" width="239">Procase C4EE</td> <td align="left" width="399">Case, 24x3.5” drives, 950 Watt PSU</td> <td sdval="1" sdnum="1043;" align="right" width="86">1</td> <td sdval="2499" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right" width="86">€ 2.499,00</td> <td sdval="2499" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right" width="86">€ 2.499,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16">Hitachi</td> <td align="left">Deskstar 7K500</td> <td align="left">SATA hard disk, 500 GB, 8,5 ms, 16 MB, 7200 RPM</td> <td sdval="22" sdnum="1043;" align="right">22</td> <td sdval="359" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 359,00</td> <td sdval="7898" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 7.898,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16">Promise</td> <td align="left">SATA II 150 SX8</td> <td align="left">SATA controller, PCI-X 64-bit 133 MHz, 8xSATA, 150 MB/s</td> <td sdval="2" sdnum="1043;" align="right">2</td> <td sdval="189" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 189,00</td> <td sdval="378" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 378,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16">Tyan</td> <td align="left">Tyan Thunder K8S Pro (S2882G3NR)</td> <td align="left">2x Opteron, PCI-X, 8xDDR-SDRAM, ATI Rage XL, 2x1GHz LAN</td> <td sdval="1" sdnum="1043;" align="right">1</td> <td sdval="459" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 459,00</td> <td sdval="459" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 459,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16">AMD</td> <td align="left">Opteron 244</td> <td align="left">1.8 GHz CPU</td> <td sdval="2" sdnum="1043;" align="right">2</td> <td sdval="199" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 199,00</td> <td sdval="398" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 398,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16">Kingston</td> <td align="left">Kingston DIMM 2 GB</td> <td align="left">333 MHz DDR, 2 GB (PC2700)</td> <td sdval="1" sdnum="1043;" align="right">1</td> <td sdval="549" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 549,00</td> <td sdval="549" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 549,00</td> </tr> <tr> <td align="left" height="16"><br> </td> <td align="left"><br> </td> <td align="left"><br> </td> <td align="left"><br> </td> <td sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="left"><br> </td> <td sdval="12181" sdnum="1043;0;[$€-413] #.##0,00;[RED][$€-413] #.##0,00-" align="right">€ 12.181,00</td> </tr> </tbody> </table> The bottleneck here will probably be the dual Gigabit Ethernet controllers, rather than the disks, if we are using it for backup.<br> <br> This is the *worst-case* cost, mind you. If we were to build a system to backup RIS raw data, it could be as simple as putting a USB drive on my desk next to someone's workstation (I vote for Arife, since her workstation is in the corner and not likely to get bumped by someone walking by) - total cost, 359 Euros:<br> <br> <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.alternate.nl/html/shop/productDetails.html?artno=A9UE03&">http://www.alternate.nl/html/shop/productDetails.html?artno=A9UE03&</a><br> <br> Which is a bit extreme, but it shows what we could do if we decided to optimise for cost/performance instead of risk- and work-aversion.<br> <br> --<br> Shane<br> <br> p.s. With 11 TB I could achieve my dream of putting all of RIS data on-line. :)<br> </body> </html>