I’ve been bouncing around a bunch of ideas for cheap, slow-ish storage. I have a situation where a few people need a gigantic closet to store things, but only need to retrieve it occasionally and when they do, usually only one or two people at a time. Given the needs, a “proper” SAN or NAS running SCSI drives was significant overkill.
I began investigating a way to use SATA drives to make a cheap NAS. I found a way. The Norco chassis with a light duty machine at the front was a perfect match for our need. But then I started thinking twoards the future… One of the people involved mentioned that if he could prove that he could store big things, he could get money in to store even bigger things…
That’s when my thoughts turned to a SAN, but even using SATA drives, there seemed to be no way around using Fibre Channel. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Fibre Channel, but it seemed a little silly to have controllers that cost twice as much as your as your actual storage Hoping that someone had previously thought about things the way I think about them, I began looking for someone who might have used GigE over copper as a medium to transmit data rather than Fibre Channel. Indeed, not only have people thought about it before, but they’ve thought about it so much, that there’s a market out there for the components you need. Currently, Coraid seems to be the top (possibly only) vendor for ATA over Ethernet (AoE) equipment. Much along my train of thought though, in their very first paragraph, they proudly boast:
With EtherDrive Storage you can create a fast shared storage system from a few Terabytes to multiple Petabytes for under $0.64 per Gigabyte.
Bingo! That’s exactly what I was hunting for. GigE will be ten times slower than Fibre Channel, but that’s ok for my people. The chassis are a lot more expensive than the Norco ones, but it’ll be worth it to go the SAN route in behind the scenes rather than need to create a new NAS each time we want to expand. Now as for as our network infrastructure surviving a big move of any of that data, that’s a job for another day…
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