These are very good points, Hans ...

If we were setting up again now, I think I'd do just what you have
suggested - it is now possible to get large amount of hard disk / RAID
storage for not very much money. Two years ago when we began getting
funds for a storage system and planning it out, 100GB of RAID would have
cost us about A$120,000 - at the tim ewe could get the MO-based system
for about half that price. So that is the way we went - in the 12 months
between writing the funding applications and getting the actual money,
we ended up getting twice as much MO storage and about 50% more
intermediate RAID storage for the same amount of money! Nevertheless, it
still seems that the price of RAIDs tends to increase somewhat
exponentially with the increased number of disks in the array.

In terms of managing the storage facility, most of the effort has been
in setting up the Novell system for a large number of users - the HSM MO
jukebox management hasn't been too bad to deal with overall (but then I
didn't have to sit there for a week or two loading, formatting,
verifying, and naming 200GB worth of MOs... we paid someone to do
that!!)

It would be worth knowing if anyone has set-up or is using a
terabyte-sized RAID based storage system in a central imaging facility (
I don't mean a big computer centre based deal run by an army of
professional computer people!!)

Hope that helps

IAN



Hans van der Voort wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> In reaction of Ian's interesting description of his HSM (Hierachical
> Storage Management) system I'd like to expand a bit on my earlier
> posting.
> The ever sinking price of disk storage rapidly makes it economical to
> replace HSMs based on MO jukeboxes or tape robots by plain disks. One
> year ago this was probably not the case.
> I recently heard of a computing centre which will ditch its 1TB HSM for
> a RAID based sysem: cheaper and fewer late hours for the sysadmins.
> For example, let's take Ian's system: 240MB of low cost disks would set
> you back only $2800. Even high performance SCSI disks (8 36GB Quantum
> disks) cost 'only' $9600. If you hook these disks to a Linux sysem (Ian
> could use his SGI, supports access from PCs & Macs) running a Samba
> server all PCs and Unix stations could access it using their native
> protocols. The most expensive part would be an extra backup tape device,
> but it is hard to spend $50000 on a pure disk + tape backup solution.
>
> Apart from the economics, I think probably the most important advantage
> of such a setup is its simplicity and ease of maintenance.
>
> Cheers, Hans
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> dr. Hans T.M. van der Voort                           ([log in to unmask])
> Scientific Volume Imaging BV,               URL: http://www.svi.nl/
> Alexanderlaan 14, 1213 XS Hilversum,                The Netherlands
> tel: ++31-35-6859405, mobile: ++31-653-345445, fax: ++31-35-6837971

--
Professor Ian Gibbins
Anatomy & Histology
Flinders University of South Australia
GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, SA 5001
Australia

Phone:  +61-8-8204 5271
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