So in the past few months there have been some interesting moves towards Open Source Storage: ZFS on Solaris, and Nexenta's software appliance. Has anyone out there deployed it to where it actually does anything useful? The cost savings are phenomenal, but nothing is truly free, you pay for it one...

Hello everyone, I have been cruising this group for some time. But most of the posts that interest me in my needs are too specific to their company. So here is my problem. I hope you can help. I work for a small law firm/medical claims office/student loans and recovery of roughly 140 users....

I'm trying to evaluate NetApp's SAN functionality, not the iSCSI way but Fibre Channel. Network Appliance offers FC-SAN connectivity for real fibre SAN's. Inside the box the LUN's they offer exist as files on top of their WAFL filesystem. So the LUN's are pure virtual. To me that sounds like it...

When a drive fails in RAID(1), I would like the RAID to stop functioning so that users will not continue to operate on the remaining mirror drive. This with a couple of small businesses not really requiring a hot spare. I cannot find details anywhere describing exactly what happens when a disk...

I work in a small office environment: 6 2K Workstations, NT Network, 2K Web Server, 2K Proxy Server, 2K File Server. Currently have a 10/20GB HP Travan (Colorado) Tape drive backing up the File Server with Tapeware. I need a better solution than this. Requirements: 1) I need to be able to backup...

If you ever opened a hard drive, you will see a couple of platters and an arm that has a head for each surface. So if 2 platters, then 4 surfaces and 4 heads. The arm moves the heads across the platters and the platters rotate, so any spot on the disk can be seeked with both movement...

I am looking at the Gateway 823 LTO-3 Autoloader, and I will appreciate user feedback. What features should I look for in such a tape drive? The featues I seek include the following: U320 or U160 interface, NT Backup and Veritas BENT/Win2003 compatibility, 8 slots, support for a cleaning tape,...

Hi all... another new person to the world of file servers. Im looking into using an old computer, beefing it up a bit, and using it for a home office storage unit. Also, Im looking into the 'home media center' thing where wireless adapters that plug into stereos or tvs stream data off of...

Hi, I'm trying to create a home for a database. The database will ultimately reach approximately 200Gb in size. Usage patterns will consist of approximately 80% read, 20% write. The vast majority of the reads will require random access to small chunks of data (less than 64k). Two SQL Server...

Every few months I go through the same routine - take my CD collection and see if time or dust got the better of it. I was wondering about CD stamping machines - would that be a better backup over a Tape? Would a CD stamping machine be flexible and cost effective? I understand a CD stamper would...

Hello, I'm looking into various ILM products such as those from Kazeon, EMC, NeoPath, etc. One question that comes up is how these products behave when a client does a full-text search against a volume that contains data that's been migrated away. From what I understand, a file access causes...

I have a Clariion CX400 being used in a lab with 250 GB sata drives and I want to pull out the drives out of the drive brackets and replace them with 500 GB or 750 GB drives I buy from ...say Frys or Best Buy. Is there a special firmware on the EMC drives that may prevent me from doing this or any...

Peter wrote: I have three of these, all brand new. All show 488MB as the size when formatting them and this is matched by the size of the files that can be transferred to them from a PC. Even allowing for 1k being 1024 etc this is a very big shortfall. Is this normal? I haven't seen...

Any know know much about the solutions from Panasas? The PanFS looks similar to clustered filesystem like CxFS, GFS, StorNext, Lustre...etc. except it is object-based. Their solution seems to include the backend storage, control blades, and some NFS/CIFS heads for interop. What is the benefit of...

Has anyone been successful in using any flavor of AIT tape drive under USB, mapped through IDE? I know Sony makes an IDE version of the drive, and it's common these days to find cases that will map IDE/EIDE hard drives into USB 2.0. I assume those same casese could map an AIT IDE drive to the...

All, I am currently having a discussion with a large storage vendor that is attempting to justify the price of it's SATA drives offered with enterprise level enclosures (eg backing onto fibre). One large part of their argument is that the SATA drives (250GB) that they use are "special", built to...

I am looking at using consolidated storage to ease our fragmented and increasingly hard to manage storage problem at my company. The conventional way to go seems to be to buy an expensive fibre channel SAN from HP or EMC, buy FC cards for all the servers, dual FC switches, and an FC array with dual...

Due to applications as the SAP client and AutoCAD 2002 our users roaming profiles contain thousands of very small files. I have noticed that the average transfer rate of those small files (~350Bytes in size) over the network is extremely slow compared to normal to large sized files (300KB up to a...

Hi, This is in reality related to low cost subsystems like SCSI-to-IDE or or FC-to-SATA or similar but one can think more general about it ... 1) What can be benefits from upgrading subsystem's memory cache from 512MB to 1GB? (or maybe graual effects: 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB, more) 2) Is it true...

Hi, I'm reading a book that describes how to plan an SQL Server installation. The book warns that one should never use RAID5 unless the volume receives less than 10% writes (i.e. 90% reads). Apparently the performance penalty for data writes is quite high with RAID5 but I'm having trouble...