[dba-VB] Anyone need a little storage?

Hi Jim

(cross posted to dba-tech)

Yes, that was "old news" but still an interesting project!

Last week I studied the offerings of large drives and noticed that 2 TB drives now are priced per GB equal to or lower than 1 TB drives. This may not be so important for normal small businesses not operating in the PB storage segment - what is important, however, is that such a drive uses no more power than a 0.5 or 1 TB drive. At least in Europe power cost is a major part of the total cost for flying such drives, thus consolidating storage may lead to important power and cost savings.

It's an interesting project of yours. Are you building one unit to share via a WAN among the participants, or are you building a unit for each?

Also, how do you plan to approach this shared storage? By FTP, iSCSI, or something else? I noticed that the unit ("pod") in the article uses HTTPs which may be nice for many purposes but useless for, say, a shared Access database. And by which media if the unit is local? Are 1 GB NICs fine? The 10 GB gear I can locate seems quite expensive.

Wouldn't it be easier (=no custom software) just to build a simple server offering iSCSI like Openfiler SAN as I mentioned a week ago:

  http://www.openfiler.com/ 

/gustav


>>> accessd at shaw.ca 06-04-2010 11:48 >>>
Hi John:

I posted that link on the DBA Tech list about a year ago (I know it is about
a year ago as Outlooks archive system had lost the post ;-))

Right now we are working on building just such a drive. There is a team of
us small entrepreneurs, all have small businesses and have seen this as
inexpensive way offset much of our overhead. My workshop is filled with
various parts and pieces and my boss is saying "Get to it."

The controllers will be Linux based which will and can show the entire drive
as a single unit which can allow certain operations to expand and shrink as
necessary. (My son-in-law is putting the software components together and
has been working on the design for close to a year.) Virtual drives will
handle various OS requirements. It will of course need the proper
controllers, LAN connections, fat pipes, fail-over systems (maybe a number
of these units in various locations) and power supplys but I am sure we will
be able to work out the details.

Probably as difficult as building the box will be setting up how each
participant will be appropriately compensated. It will have to be some rate
built on space used, hits level, compensation for hosting it and the amount
of data being transferred.

As far as I can see the design is brilliant.

My long range plans are to work with such super databases as 'Cassandra'
where a billion records can be processed at the same rate as a RDBMS can
process a million. 

If you haven't checked out my post(s) on the DBA tech list at least check
the following links: http://cassandra.apache.org and
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Announcing-APDB-The-Worlds-Fastest-Database.aspx (This might be something you should be looking at; maybe in the future.

Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com 
[mailto:dba-vb-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of jwcolby
Sent: Monday, April 05, 2010 8:27 PM
To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving; VBA
Subject: [dba-VB] Anyone need a little storage?


http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-features/30922-how-to-build-a-cheap-petabyte-server-lessons-learned

-- 
John W. Colby
www.ColbyConsulting.com