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Do-It-Yourself Fibre Channel Array
skarphedin writes "There's an interesting story here on a do-it-yourself fibre channel array. These guys make one for under $250 and it can perform up there with 15k SCSI in some cases." You know you want one.
Yeah this is cool and such like but what if you want to mount it across two machine using two FCA's? You need software that allows file locking (such as SGI's CXFS) and that costs. Mind you if you only wanted it on one machine why not just buy a load of disks because in honesty when are you going to need such high amounts of bandwidth?
Rus
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Then he goes and mounts them in the case with wood!! Why? Its an insulator!!! Ok, maybe he didn't have the necessary metal skills (or equipment even) to make a custom bracket, but using wood to mount a drive just seems a bit dangerous to me.
You're missing the point.
Of course you can do raid with ide, scsi or whatever that outperforms a single disk. However, all disks sharing a bus also shares the total bandwidth of that bus.
What I'm trying to say is that when you have a stripe (=raid 0 or 0+1), FC is faster than SCSI because of the way the communication protocols work.
There is always FUD associated with "Enterprise" class hardware and software. Some things really do need to perform at specific level or a baseline to run in this class, others do not but ride the coat tails of others that due for the exact reason you specify -- people do not want to bet their job on it, remember the old saying, you will never get fired for buying IBM.
At work we decommisioned a large Compaq 2 year old server with a nice raid setup and SAN connectivity running Novell to make room for our MS takeover. The last job this server performed was storage to allow us to boot workstations with a network floppy and create and restore desktop images and for general storage in the IT department. It wasnt to bad but we never really achieved any more then 2-3MBytes/sec when transferring files to and from it. We did not have our new MS server to replace it yet so I took a small footprint Compaq P-III desktop with 512MB ram and loaded RH on it, slapped in an extra 7200rpm Maxtor 160GB IDE drive. Installed Samba, joined it to our W2K domain and it works great. We pull and store multiple images to the thing at roughly 5Mbyte/sec per PC and it has a sustained thoughput of about 10-12Mbyte/sec per HD or per network card (I have two NICs and you can select which one to use from the client boot disk when you connect. It also lets us burn DVD's directly from a Windows workstation at 2.4 speed (3.5Mbytes/sec) which our Novell server could never handle (many buffer underruns or had to transfer image file to the PC first).
It does not have the redundancy of the old Novell server as I have a no raid setup but I back up the files using rsync to my other Linux machine on a daily basis and we have hundreds of other similar desktops I could grab parts from if needed. That desktop coast us about $600. that server was well over $5000.
I guess the point is, it does not have to say "Enterprise", server, or cost a lot of money to perform the work you may need.
The only other small problem is if I get hit by a bus they are screwed as the rest of the department has little interest in the headless Linux thing I have sitting on my desk. I am willing to explain it to anyone but being in a MS driven shop, so far only one person is interested. All they know is it currently works great.
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