"Michael S. Peek" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > ...That is, unless someone knows a good and cheap way to have big-time > data density outside the machine. The other option I'm looking at is > a NAS, but it seems to me that the cheaper solution is to build a > storage server myself instead.
Price it out carefully; but remember, the more expensive netapp/emc will be a lot more reliable, however, if it works for your application, just building 2 yourself (and keeping one spare) is quite often a lot cheaper. Do a nightly rsync, and you are ready for most disasters with a half-day rollback worst-case. Of course, if restoring from your last backup is millions of dollars of lost profits, you might want to go with the emc/netapp- but if restoring from your last backup is more like a couple thousand (or even a couple tens of thousands of dollars) building one yourself with one in reserve and a good (tested!) backup setup may be the best solution. The other thing to consider is just engineering your application so that it stores the data on local disks; In terms of hardware (rather than engineering time) the cheapest (and probably highest performance) solution would be to just put one or two local disks internal to each computer, and have your application distribute the data in a redundant fashon... of course, depending on your application, this can be a lot of work- but if you have more Engineering power than dollars, you can get a good deal this way. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
