[Lias] NAS/SAN storage recommendations?

[Les Bell]

R&J Stuart <rjstuart at bigpond.net.au> wrote:

>>
 . . .lots of good stuff, snipped . . .
<<

That's a keeper, Robert!

I agree with you about using SCSI on the higher-end systems; around 1990 or
so I'd use nothing else, and in fact, I still have one system running that
has a SCSI drive, but you could hardly characterize it as high end; it's a
486-33 with an Adaptec 1542 controller and an IBM 4 GB drive that I use as
a slave master DNS. 13 years of sterling service, and still going strong!

However, by the mid-nineties, I was finding it very hard to justify the
cost of SCSI drives for most of my systems; the bang/buck ratio of IDE is
just so good these days. As an example, I just went to the Harris
Technology website (http://www.ht.com.au) and looked up some prices.

Seagate Barracuda 120 GB 8 MB cache UATA drive: $326.00
Seagate Cheetah 146.8 GB 8 MB cache SCSI drive: $2,045

(I couldn't find anything closer to 120 GB than the 146.8 GB Cheetah.)
Maxtor and Fujitsu drives are in the same ballpark, and IBM doesn't seem to
have a drive that big. That gives IDE a cost of 0.3c per MB, as opposed to
SCSI at 1.4c per MB. I know that SCSI deals with buffered requests better,
has a higher transfer rate and the drive spins faster, but almost five
times the price? I wish it wasn't so . . .

Just recently I've been tinkering with the Promise TX2 Pro RAID controller,
and while Promise's idea of supporting Linux sucks, big time, the device is
better than nothing. I'm going to recommend something similar to our school
for the forthcoming server upgrade, although I'd rather use a supplier with
better Linux support.

W.r.t. tapes: you're spot on. I was discussing this with a colleague today,
and we both agree that tape backup is neither art nor science - it appears
to be some kind of magic that involves sacrificing animals (my theory
involves sacrificing the animals on the covers of O'Reilly books, e.g.
sacificing camels, llamas or black sheep for Perl programming problems,
down to sacrificing a cricket for DNS problems. I guess I'd better stock up
on Indian gharials, huh?).

FWIW, I've been experimenting with my tape setup, having had three (out of
four) Imation 20 GB tapes *apparently* go bad. One tape valiantly soldiers
on, running for four hours a night, backing everything up. But I've just
discovered that I can apparently run a 10 GB backup successfully *if the
machine is rebooted first*. Tapes that previously seemed to have gone bad
are now OK. Go figure. . . .

Tonight or tomorrow, the tape drive goes into a faster machine, with a
better quality Intel mobo. We'll see what that turns up . . .

Best,

--- Les Bell, RHCE, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]