Cheap disk farms [was: Looking for Optical Disk Jukebox]

[Scott Leadley]

In article <grl.653813111 at groucho> grl at brb.dmt.csiro.au (Greg Lehmann) writes:
>leadley at uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Scott Leadley) writes:
>>	Pinnacle Micro, sells a 6GB, 10 disk jukebox for approximately $10K.
>>I've used one of their single disk systems but have no experience with this
>>product.
> ... a REO 1300 [a dual disk system, not a jukebox]
> ... has the nice feature of being
>able to access two sides on the 2 disks as a single filesystem. This means
>you can have 500MB file-systems instead of the usual 250MB (per side) ones.
>I don't know if you can have the 50 disk juke-box configured to do this.

	The advertisement I saw implies that with a custom driver (which they
can supply) you can bind all surfaces together as a large virtual disk.  I like
this feature, but would only use it in situtations where picker thrashing on
files spanning surface boundaries was unlikely or unimportant (i.e. you have
LOTS of time).  Pinnacle's sales address is:

	Pinnacle Micro
	15265 Alton Pkwy.
	Irvine, CA  92718

	voice (outside CA):	(800)533-7070
	voice (inside CA):	(714)727-3300


	If you need reasonable response time along with the advantages of a
large virtual disk and cheap magneto optical storage, you need to a system that
caches files in use on a magnetic disk (commonly refered to as "staging").
There are two vendors that I know of selling integrated NFS servers using
magneto optical storage and staging:

	Epoch Systems
	313 Boston Post Rd. West
	Marlborough, MA  01752

	voice: (800)US-EPOCH


	Zetaco
	6850 Shady Oak Rd.
	Eden Praire, MN  55344

	voice:	(612)941-9480
	FAX:	(612)941-1395


	Anyone interested in those systems might also be interested in the
NFS server from:

	Auspex Systems
	2952 Bunker Hill Lane
	Santa Clara, CA  95054

	voice:	(408)492-0900
	FAX:	(408)492-0909
	email:	sales at auspex.com or uunet!auspex!sales

that uses SCSI disk arrays.


	Now what I'd like are reviews from people who have actually managed an
Epoch I (Epoch Systems), NETstor Server (Zetaco) or NS 5000 (Auspex Systems).
-- 
					Scott Leadley - leadley at cc.rochester.edu