96 TB NAS solution

when you start getting to those sizes, you run more chances of corruption and failure, so you need to use more drive space for redundancy.

I would personally get some simple low end server boards, drop 4GB of ECC memory in them, install linux, use ZFS+RAID-Z, put GLUSTER on it and share it out as a network drive.

It would be very resilient to failures and data corruption.

Hi Sherif,

I've been looking at large NAS systems as well, prices are all over the place... You'd probably be looking at close to $100k from someone like Dell for a Raided NAS that size (2 x NX4), while you could spec out one from "Digiliant" for less than $30k... http://www.digiliant.com/default.php?cPath=80_46_130&os...

Shoot, these guys have 96TB for less than $20k - http://www.polywell.com/us/storage/NetDisk5048A.asp


Drawing from the above advice and the responses to my other post here though, if you're not looking at DIY solutions you might want to look at the systems from DNF Storage. Seems they can come pre-configured with ZFS and RAID-Z2.

You'd need two of these to hit 96TB:
http://www.dnfstorage.com/products.asp/section/Product~...

Haven't gotten pricing from those guys yet, or heard anything about the quality of their hardware, so you're on your own there. They have contact info on their website though.

Good luck!

I heard some very good prices from a company at SigGraph whose name I can't recall at the moment. They had developed a special rack drawer that mounted the drives vertically inside the drawer. The result is they could fill the entire depth of the rack with drives, and have everything logically closer to the controller. I'm roughly guessing at the actual density but I think they could fit the entire 96TB in 10U worth of rack space, plus some. (Well, then you need the redundancy, but could mean the difference between one full rack and three.)

They claimed massive throughput, but of course they were probably employing the usual tricks where they claim throughputs that they get using 15k SCSI or SSDs, alongside capacities they get using big SATA drives.

I believe they were quoting dollar figures lower than the $100k.

EDIT:
Wow I just clicked on the Polywell link supplied by jtric. I don't recognize the name, but either that's the same company or they developed the same solution.

What I wonder is what happens when you have to pull the drawer out to replace a drive, and accidentally pull the cable connecting the whole drawer...