[Beowulf] Some perspective to this DIY storage server mentioned at Storagemojo

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 04:44:32PM -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:

> I'm waiting for the day I can buy a X4540 without disks.  Or maybe it >
> will still be too expensive...

I've also become sufficiently annoyed at Sun for their unwillingness
or inability to ship hotplug drive carriers without (premium-priced)
drives in them to switch to Supermicro.

Below is maybe not Thumper, but you can put 2 TByte drives
at 100 EUR/TByte costs into them yourself, giving you 50
TByte raw storage (or 48 TByte raw storage, and 4x 2.5"
SSDs for hybrid storage ZIL/L2ARC cache with Opensolaris)
in 4U of rack space.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/chassis_storage.cfm

[...]
  	
SC848A

  - 24 Hot-swap HDDs in 4U

(Quad Motherboard Support)

Optimized for enterprise-level heavy-capacity storage applications,
Supermicro's SC848 Chassis supports 4-way serverboards that demand high
volume I/O or computational usage and features 24 hot-swap 3.5" SAS/SATA hard
drive trays and 2 fixed internal hard drive bays in a 4U space. The SC848
design offers maximum HDD per space ratio in a 4U form factor, high power
efficiency (up to 88%) with (2+1) redundant 1800W power supply, optimized HDD
signal trace routing and improved HDD tray design to dampen HDD vibrations
and maximize performance.
 
	
SC846A/TQ/E1/E2

  - 24 Hot-swap HDDs in 4U

Optimized for enterprise-level heavy-capacity storage applications,
Supermicro's SC846 Chassis features 24 hot-swap 3.5" SAS/SATA hard drive
trays and 2 fixed internal hard drive bays in a 4U space. The SC846 design
offers maximum HDD per space ratio in a 4U form factor, high power
efficiency, optimized HDD signal trace routing and improved HDD tray design
to dampen HDD vibrations and maximize performance. Equipped with a 900W or
Gold Level 1200W (93%+) high-efficiency redundant power supply and 5 hot-plug
redundant cooling fans, the SC846 is a reliable and maintenance-free storage
workhorse system.