Re: Anyone using a SAN?

On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 13:41 +0000, Matthew wrote:
> On Mon, 18 Feb 2008, Peter Koczan wrote:
> > One of the other things I was interested in was the "hidden costs" of
> > a SAN. For instance, we'd probably have to invest in more UPS capacity
> > to protect our data. Are there any other similar points that people
> > don't initially consider regarding a SAN?
>
> You may well find that the hardware required in each machine to access the
> SAN (fibrechannel cards, etc) and switches are way more expensive than
> just shoving a cheap hard drive in each machine. Hard drives are
> mass-produced, and remarkably cheap for what they do. SAN hardware is
> specialist, and expensive.

Can be, but may I point to a recent posting on Beowulf ml [1] and the
article it references [2] Showing that the per node price of SDR IB has
come down far enough to in some cases compete with GigE. ymmv, but I'm
in the planning phase for a massive storage system and it's something
we're looking into. Just thought I'd share

Success!

./C

[1]
http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.beowulf.org/archive/2008-January/020538.html

[2] http://www.clustermonkey.net/content/view/222/1/