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Cheap and dead good setup: ProLiant DL180 + 1TB disks w/ compatible trays + Linux + Zumastor

The HP ProLiant DL180 server is a 2U rack server with 12 SATA 3.5 slots starting at US $1299. You may also use the older DL320s but its processor is less powerful, it only admits 8GB RAM and the machine is more expensive.

Buy the server, then buy 12 empty trays at US $25. I've always bought them at SCSITray (you are looking for part number 373211-001

Now, but 2x80GB SATA disks for system in RAID-1 and 10x1TB SATA disks for data in RAID-5 (if you want RAID-6, you need a P400 controller with BBWC or a P800 controller with BBWC, the P600 won't work with > 2TB volumes).

For the software part, install Linux and Zumastor, which provides ZFS-like features on top of any Linux filesystem (I'm using it on top of ext3, some people prefer XFS). In case you want to have several replicated fileservers, Zumastor does replication automagically for you.

Honestly, I hope Sun doesn't change the ZFS licence, because in another couple of years I expect we will have been able to achieve pretty much everything ZFS does without having to roll it all into one jinormous all singing+dancing filesystem that ate the OS. In other words, we think we can do snapshots, flexible raid, allocate from pools etc, efficiently without violating layers. And actually, we were replicating before the ZFS guys and, um, the ZFS algorithm bears a striking resemblance to ours, which we published a few months before they showed up with a prototype. Hmm. Anyway, even if ZFS does go non-evil it certainly won't mean we will stop, because we still do things they don't do like run underneath _any_ filesystem so you can stick with what you know or what works for you. But it would definitely remove some of the incentive for further developing our stuff. Smartest think Sun could do to tell the truth, but personally I think they won't do it, and one day Mr. Schwartz will wake up and find ZFS irrelevant because Ext4 + ddsnap outperforms it plus has millions more installs and ten times as many developers to widen the gap. We shall see.

I hadn't noticed before how cleverly, yet ethically Red Hat leverages the community by exercising enterprise features in Fedora before springing them on enterprise customers. Not only is playing with the latest LVM features in a low risk setting fun, but it helps Red Hat sell to big business when I discover breakage. (I really have to try out Zumastor...)

Take a look at our nice little project to change the face of storage on Linux, with snapshotting, replicating, NFS and Samba serving, and loads of cutting edge storage technology. Plenty of kernel and userspace code still to design and implement, to make our already-working system better, faster, shinier. 3D gui? Sure, we'll take it.

I wear two hats, so let me shamelessly plug both projects I'm on: Wine is in its fourth glorious year of the Summer of Code already ( http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode/PreviousProjects ) and each year has been fantastic. See our ideas page is at http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode Wine is going to hit 1.0 this summer, it's an exciting time to be involved. Zumastor (a project to add better snapshots and remote replication to Linux) is overjoyed to be participating in Summer of Code for the first time this year. See our ideas page at http://zumastor.org/soc.html or our home page at http://zumastor.org/ I look forward to working with y'all.

I wear two hats, so let me shamelessly plug both projects I'm on: Wine is in its fourth glorious year of the Summer of Code already ( http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode/PreviousProjects ) and each year has been fantastic. See our ideas page is at http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode Wine is going to hit 1.0 this summer, it's an exciting time to be involved. Zumastor (a project to add better snapshots and remote replication to Linux) is overjoyed to be participating in Summer of Code for the first time this year. See our ideas page at http://zumastor.org/soc.html or our home page at http://zumastor.org/ I look forward to working with y'all.

Your guys can check this http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/ and this http://www.zumastor.org/