[Beowulf] Software Raid and Raid in general

[Alvin Oga]

hi ya beowulf'erz

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Joel Jaeggli wrote:

> Money is not irrevelevant to such subsystems, rather revenue per 
> transaction justifies their existance. There's a continium between what I 
> pay for nas storage (about $2000 per TB) what my currenent employer pays 
> (around $10,000 per TB) and what financial services companies that value 
> performance, and other features over capacity pay (closer to $100,000 per 
> tb) that covers quite a broad range of hardware.

that's the $$MM questions ..

money doesn't necessarily solve the "problem" ..

however,
different markets seems to have the perceived value of "more" performance,
reliability, support, compatibility, advertising, marketing, sales,
overhead etc "implied" by paying the 50x more expensive systems
for the same storage capacity and reliability and performance

it's  probably to do with "old time managers" that prefer tried and
true and trusted systems over the past 10-15-20 yrs vs trying something
new and getting burnt, which they cannot afford to do and lose data

i think they use use the "savings" to pay for the expert techies
that can make the new cots systems perform as good/better than the
"old fashion" 50x more expensive way  of doing stuff 

if one's NFS backup strategy is working right, you can have 5-10
"cots" backups of the entire primary 100TB system, ( cpu/mem/ethernet
backups and not just disk subsystem that "raid" might solve )


- how and where to save 10TB or 100TB of data with cots is not trivial
  if your whole project depends on that data  and "raid" does not
  solve the problem

c ya
alvin