[ale] Giant storage system suggestions

[Alex Carver]

On 7/12/2012 04:36, Barlow, Jim D wrote:
>
>
> As Jeff Layton says:
>
>> If you want to go a bit cheaper, then I recommend going the
>> Gluster route. You can get it for free and it only takes a bunch
>> of servers. However, if the data is important, then build two
>> copies of the hardware and rsync between them - at least you
>> have a backup copy at some point.
>
>> Good luck
>> Jeff
>
> Alex:
>
> It is a great time to check  out Gluster http://gluster.org as of the 3.3 release.  Red Hat has put a lot into the project lately.   I've been testing it for my own uses and have been delighted with it.   It may complement your ideas.
> I've ordered some inexpensive x86_64 hardware  function as Gluster bricks for my own elastically scalable storage.     It mounts as a high performance fuse file system or NFS, with a Samba shim you are good to go with CIFS.

I took a look at Gluster but I don't think I want to go that route.  I 
want to have the fewest number of machines/OSes to maintain (ideally 
just one but maybe two if the array gets too big for one machine).  This 
would be especially important at work where I can't get more than one or 
two network IPs.  The maintenance requirements to keep a half a dozen or 
more machines up to date in software is a lot more work than just one 
that I can leave under my desk and check on once in a while.

So I think I'm still going to be leaning towards one machine and a pile 
of drives for now.