Jello wrote:
Wow, really 'cheap' RAID storage solutions, where everything is redundant. And it uses Ultra ATA drives each on their own controller so you can cheaply expand with UATA drives for a fraction of the SCSI price. And the whole thing is easy to manage, cause its from Apple.

Uhh, EMC has been doing this for at least 3 years, and their cost for a 14 tray EIDE RAID/SAN/NAS enclosure was around 19K, with drives.

It's easy to manage, and works with all operating systems... Where is the "bargain" or differentiator? Just because it's apple, doesn't give me any real information.

If you only want Direct Attached Storage, (DAS) then look at these...

http://www.sunstarco.com/Network%20Attached%20Storage/DAS/DAS.htm

http://techshop.earthlink.net/x10807:4EK118806~10:20

dc0de wrote:

Jello wrote:
Wow, really 'cheap' RAID storage solutions, where everything is redundant. And it uses Ultra ATA drives each on their own controller so you can cheaply expand with UATA drives for a fraction of the SCSI price. And the whole thing is easy to manage, cause its from Apple.

Uhh, EMC has been doing this for at least 3 years, and their cost for a 14 tray EIDE RAID/SAN/NAS enclosure was around 19K, with drives.

It's easy to manage, and works with all operating systems... Where is the "bargain" or differentiator? Just because it's apple, doesn't give me any real information.

Uh, Apple has been doing this for more than three years as well, and the price for the apple is much less than $19K? They start at$6K for 1TB, and go to $13K for 14 bays full for 7TB. Its not particularly earth shattering, but it is cheap, and I might use it, thus the meming.

Thanks for the links.

Jello wrote:

dc0de wrote:

Jello wrote:
Wow, really 'cheap' RAID storage solutions, where everything is redundant. And it uses Ultra ATA drives each on their own controller so you can cheaply expand with UATA drives for a fraction of the SCSI price. And the whole thing is easy to manage, cause its from Apple.

Uhh, EMC has been doing this for at least 3 years, and their cost for a 14 tray EIDE RAID/SAN/NAS enclosure was around 19K, with drives.

It's easy to manage, and works with all operating systems... Where is the "bargain" or differentiator? Just because it's apple, doesn't give me any real information.

The price for the apple is much less than $19K.

Yes, you are correct, the Apple X-serve is $16,697.00, when you add all of the features and services that you would get with an EMC solution. Marry that with the fact that the EMC Solution has 8Gbytes of cache, and is provided by the leader in the Storage field, I would opt to pay the extra $2500 dollars to have EMC running in my data center. Apple has been notorious for changing hardware architecture after selling it into corporations, leaving their IT investments un-supportable and wholly unsupported.

Jim "Go with the experts, it's worth the extra money" Noble.

dc0de wrote:

Jello wrote:

dc0de wrote:

Jello wrote:
Wow, really 'cheap' RAID storage solutions, where everything is redundant. And it uses Ultra ATA drives each on their own controller so you can cheaply expand with UATA drives for a fraction of the SCSI price. And the whole thing is easy to manage, cause its from Apple.

Uhh, EMC has been doing this for at least 3 years, and their cost for a 14 tray EIDE RAID/SAN/NAS enclosure was around 19K, with drives.

It's easy to manage, and works with all operating systems... Where is the "bargain" or differentiator? Just because it's apple, doesn't give me any real information.

The price for the apple is much less than $19K.

Yes, you are correct, the Apple X-serve is $16,697.00, when you add all of the features and services that you would get with an EMC solution. Marry that with the fact that the EMC Solution has 8Gbytes of cache, and is provided by the leader in the Storage field, I would opt to pay the extra $2500 dollars to have EMC running in my data center. Apple has been notorious for changing hardware architecture after selling it into corporations, leaving their IT investments un-supportable and wholly unsupported.

Jim "Go with the experts, it's worth the extra money" Noble.

Now I'm confused, because I was just talking about the XServe RAID, which is $13K for 14 drives and 7TB, and actually I don't need that much. I'd need the a model that runs about $8K.

Now I'm confused, because I was just talking about the XServe RAID, which is $13K for 14 drives and 7TB, and actually I don't need that much.

Well, actually, if you add the features that the EMC comes with, it's more like 17K...

I'd need the a model that runs about $8K.

If you need 3.5TB of ATA, and you think $8K is a good price, then knock yourself out... personnally, I think that spending $8K for 3.5TB of RAID is way too much money for such a small raid set. And if you were spending that much, I would suggest SATA, at least you won't suffer the slowness of ATA solution.

Lastly, if you are purchasing this for the RAID fault tolerant features, you should purchase the battery backed cache, and the extended warranty and support... which Apple seems to like, as it takes the price of the 3.5TB solution up to $12,147.00 when you add the battery backed cache, Service Parts and Apple Care plan for 3 years.

That's an aweful big chunk of change for a company that can't keep their architecture straight... again, I'd purchase the EMC... but, I don't have a hard-on for apple... I like "best of breed" products... not the pretty ones...

dc0de wrote:

Now I'm confused, because I was just talking about the XServe RAID, which is $13K for 14 drives and 7TB, and actually I don't need that much.

Well, actually, if you add the features that the EMC comes with, it's more like 17K...

I'd need the a model that runs about $8K.

If you need 3.5TB of ATA, and you think $8K is a good price, then knock yourself out... personnally, I think that spending $8K for 3.5TB of RAID is way too much money for such a small raid set. And if you were spending that much, I would suggest SATA, at least you won't suffer the slowness of ATA solution.

Lastly, if you are purchasing this for the RAID fault tolerant features, you should purchase the battery backed cache, and the extended warranty and support... which Apple seems to like, as it takes the price of the 3.5TB solution up to $12,147.00 when you add the battery backed cache, Service Parts and Apple Care plan for 3 years.

That's an aweful big chunk of change for a company that can't keep their architecture straight... again, I'd purchase the EMC... but, I don't have a hard-on for apple... I like "best of breed" products... not the pretty ones...

We're so far away from actually purchasing anything, that the Apple product is the first one I even looked at. As to slowness, that shouldn't be a problem with Apple's solution because of the single controller per drive, right? Its touted as being quite fast. You clearly know alot more about this than me, and I have alot of research to do ;)

I would recommend defining exactly what you are looking for, then identify the vendors that can provide it.

Here are some questions to ask your group.

1. What is the primary purpose of the Storage?
2. Will we ever want to network or SAN attach this storage?
3. What features of a RAID Array are most important, in order?
a. RAID Striping and Parity? (fault tolerance across disks)
b. Caching and speed of reading data?
c. Caching and speed of writing data?
d. 99.999% uptime?
e. large capacity storage?

These will start to provide you with a basis on what hardware vendors to look for, and what the group is looking to achieve.

This will help you determine who has the solution that will fit your need, and budget, without drawing out the process...