Expandable Local Network Storage Solutions ?

[djbeta]

Hi there,

I know a few scientists that collaborate within a department who are interested in setting up a Local Area storage system that would start out at about 10 Terabytes and would probably grow to as many as 100 over the next 3 years.

Could anyone recommend any solutions that are possible for non-techies to setup, but that provide features like mirrored drives so that if one goes bad the administrator can be alerted to change the hard drive ?

We do have a tech department that administers a data center off site, but they aren't able to provide the amount of storate that these scientists need, and they also perform such rigorous (and very expensive) backup procedures that aren't really necessary for the bulk of what these scientists plan to store.

I know very little about this.. so any advice/leads/suggestions would be appreciated.

Money isn't a real issue, but of course, I'm sure they'd like to get the most bang for their buck.

The group is comprised mostly of mac users and a few PC users.

[eric2006]

If money isn't too much of an issue, an Xserve (RAID) solution may be a good option. They have excellent reliability and usability.

www.apple.com/xserve

[djbeta]

thanks,

what other options are there out there ? I've read about a few things in recent months on MacNN but I can't recall their names..

If there's something a bit simpler than an Xserve that allows simple network storage that is expandable and redundant, I'd love to hear about it.
As far as I know, an Xserve provides tons of features that we really won't be using. We just need storage.

[Satcomer]

Then what you want is a RAID array.

[Decade]

If you need all 10-100TB to appear as a single filesystem, then I think you really do need some Storage Area Network (SAN) system, such as the Xserve, Xserve RAID, and Xsan software, or just Xserve RAID, Xsan software (or ADIC's StorNext client for the PCs), and fibre-channel cards for your desktops.

Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems are normally easier to use, with systems like Buffalo's TeraStation offering RAID-1 for up to 1.5TB of space (at current hard drive sizes, 4x.75TB, divided by 2 for redundancy). However, at 10TB, that solution becomes unwieldy, and you might want the slightly simplified management of the Petabox (http://www.capricorn-tech.com/) as used by the Internet Archive. I don't feel like processing the data to see if this is actually any more cost-effective than a SAN solution.