[Beowulf] Storage - vendors

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Mark Hahn wrote:
... 
> > vendor          capacity        size    $Cad list per TB  density
> > dell/emc	     12x250          3U      $7500            1.0TB/U
> > apple	     14x250          3U      $4000            1.166
> > hp/msa1500cs     12x250x4        10U     $3850            1.2


    1Us w/ 8 drives  3 * 8 * 250     3U      $ 9K /6TB        2.oTB/U
   Blades w/ 4drive  10* 4 * 250     4U      $20K /10TB       2.5TB/U
 
* plain old 1Us with 8 drives per 1U allows ( 2.0TB per 1U )
	http://linux-1u.net/Dwg/jpg.sm/c2610.jpg 
	
* 10 mini-itx blades per 4U chassis w/ 4 disks 
  ( 1TB per blade, 10 blade per 4U chassis )
	http://itx-blades.net

* adding FC cards will increase the system costs :-)
	- the FC/san market is fairly tight market and very expensive 

> > (divide $Cad by 1.25 or so to get $US.)  all three plug into FC.
> > the HP goes up to 8 shelves per controller or 24 TB per FC port, though.
...

> The cheapest solutions are those you build yourself, BTW -- as one might
> expect -- followed by ones that a vendor assembles for you, followed in
> order by proprietary/named solutions that require special software or
> special software and special hardware.

"costs" are usually based on "vendor name recognition" compared to the
raw costs of parts and the closed market of competitors selling their 
widgets ( costs of parts is minimal compared to their retail pricing )

> describe their off-the-shelf solutions that scale to 100+ TB sizes, and
> was directed to e.g. http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php) but think
> of me as being hypercautious in my already admitted ignorance;-)

their design is also based on their ability to use rs232 to log into
the adjacent box if it goes down for some reason, but, rs232 might
not work if the power fialed or the machine didn't boot to get to 
the init level to turn on agetty/uugetty

----

it'd be good to have a 2nd 100TB backup subsystem ... as it's not trivial
to backup and restore ( from bare metal ) that amount of data 
and you want to be certain you don't lose yesterday'sor last weeks data
due to today's faulty backup

c ya
alvin