[Hcoop-discuss] Server pricing

[Adam Chlipala]

Justin S. Leitgeb wrote:

>The problem is that if we're really talking about a terabyte of storage 
>space or more, I think that it is still outside of our budget to buy 
>space that is both abundant *and* fast.  If you don't believe me, try 
>pricing out a system with 1 TB of SCSI storage in RAID 10, a powerful 
>RAID controller, and a 2U+ machine to house it in.  By the time we came 
>up with $6,000+ US to spend on such a system, we would have outgrown it 
>in terms of our space needs and have to buy another bigger and faster one.
>  
>
We wouldn't set up a terabyte of storage right away.  Ideally the 
fileserver would be designed to make it easy to swap disks in and out.  
We'd come up with a reasonable policy where members pay for disk usage, 
so that no one would have to pay for more than he really needs (modulo 
the fact that we'd be dealing with SCSI storage, if we decide that 
that's important).

Maybe we could start with cheaper disks and use this shared filesystem 
only for backup purposes and direct access that isn't speed critical?  
It really seems like having a single global namespace for critical files 
is important to include in our set-up from the start, and we shouldn't 
restrict our vision to the most standard approaches in figuring out how 
to make it work.

>I know that one of the reasons that we were looking at an architecture 
>that gave a fileserver a central place was that it would make 
>administration easier... but we have to recognize all of the tools that 
>are available to us, as unix/linux admins in a growing network.  I'm 
>thinking especially of tools like cfengine, which I'm deploying now to 
>help manage a network of 300 + linux boxes and a handful of Sun machines.
>  
>
That is for a centrally maintained network, not a system whose services 
are configured by hundreds of mutually-untrusting users, right?  Do you 
think that would actually work for us?