> It might help people to understand how ridiculous they > sound going on and on > about buying a premium storage appliance without any > storage.
Since I started this, let me explain to those who can't begin to understand why I proposed something so "stupid". At work (branch of a federal gov't big-5 Department) I need 40TB but have next to nothing in budget. (For some reason all you damn citizens think you're entitled to keep most of your paychecks to yourself instead living off what I decide to give you in foodstamps and rent-controled housing.) Therefore, I can't afford let alone justify the preposterous premium demanded by "enterprise" EMC/Sun/IBM/NetApp. I can really use dedup, (integrity would be nice), and reasonable rack and power footprint since I'm out of that too. I can't exactly march into my boss' office and propose that we build my own at-home special which is 16 WD RE2/3 drives $(60) in a $70 case, $100 power supply, four 4-in-3 modules ($30) and a Chenbro SAS expander ($250) now can I... Aside: I find it laughable for anyone to claim a J4500 is "premium" anything. IBM DS800, EMC Symetrix, NetApp FAS5xxx, sure. But a glorified JBOD enclosure? Put down the damn cool-aid! The cheapest solution out there that isn't a Supermicro-like server chassis, is DAS in the form of HP or Dell MD-series which top out at 15 or 16 3" drives. I can only chain 3 units per SAS port off a HBA in either case. Enter the J4500, 48 drives in 4U, what looks to be solid engineering, and redundancy in all the right places. An empty chassis at $3000 is totally justifiable. Maybe as high as $4000. In comparison a naked Dell MD1000 is $2000. If you do the subtraction from SUN's claimed "breakthru" pricing of $1/GB, the chassis cost works out to $4000. I can live with that. Now look up the price for 24TB and it's 28 freaking thousand! I can buy 24TB worth of good SATA drives for $5000 all day long and twice on Sunday. (http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1531954) I can buy Dell trays from DELL themselves let alone a bevy of 3rd parties for as low as $12 each. SUN's are like $25 on the aftermarket and much harder to come by. So, does my question make sense now? My only play is Dell at this time. I was TRYING to see if the SUN route could be made possible since it would be the better solution. But I guess I'm not "enterprisy" enough, ie with so much more money than brains for the likes of SUN to give 2 (@Rts. Dell and HP *WANT* my business by pricing things where I can reasonably get to them. A fully-qualified 500GB SATA drive from DELL is $300, so a 3x multiplier. Still quite a bit more than I think is warranted, but SUN wants 5x? Nothing SUN makes is so much better than DELL/HP, indeed they are essentially indistinguishable that they can get away with pretending to be EMC. Is it any wonder they failed? Spare me the bit about how there is so much expensive and complex engineering invested in something as stupid straight-forward as the J4500 or in qualifying drive firmware. I've worked on qualifying SUN, IBM, and other storage products (firmware, hardware, OS drivers) some of which were of our own designs that the big names simply slapped their label on. They outsource this stuff to a certain company just west of Chicago on route 355 (among others). I know what I was paid. We had 4 guys in that lab and as a overhead/GB we were no bigger a pimple on a gnat's hind end. There is no mysterious voodoo in storage enclosure design that requires an army of highly trained PhD's months to figure out. _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
