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costs of storage arrays and drives
when it come to storage. a while ago, fibre channel (FC) was the path for high end storage, for high availablity, highest reliablity, and performance. The solutions were 100% SCSI based. then came along IDE/ATA solutions, and the pricing dropped through the floor. at my local electronics store, they offer 300 GB 5 year warranty seagate PATA drives for around $115 (after rebate and sales tax). moving up to 300 GB seagate SATA drives cost just $135 (after rebate and sales tax).
how can a storage company then justify $5000 per TB of storage, when you can get 1.2 TB of drive storage for under $550 today (you need a couple of addresses to send rebates to, but we all have lots of friends). sure, the enclosure costs something, but certainly not almost 10 times the cost of the spinning disks. i’ve heard presentations from the four large FC fabric vendors (qlogic, brocade, cisco, and mcdata), and they claim it costs just $500 per port to hook up FC storage array to your workstations. compare that to iSCSI at around $20 a port using commodity 1GbE PCI cards, or maybe $50 a port using 1394a/1294b (firewire 400/firewire800) networking.
you’re always going to pay a premium for the storage array, but should the cabling also cost just a much?
quick froogle.com pricing on empty storage arrays today, who know what dlink will price at:
$3580 4U 12-bay SATA backplane kingston storcase S10H108, SCSI 320 connections
$3240 1U 4-bay SATA backplane adaptec iSA1500 storage array, 1GbE connection
$3465 2U 8-bay promise vtrak M200i, dual 1GbE connectionsismael rosales
chief information architect
https://www.cloakmedia.com/ -
1 Reply
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I am right there with you. I have been looking for a opportunity to place a near line storage next to my G5 and PC’s with the option in the future of connecting other clients. The Terrablock server (www.facilistech.net)certainly seems like an ideal solution however here again it would seem that the pricing doesn’t quite shake out. I would really love to hear from facilistech, so I called them. Great responce and information, if your looking give them a call.
Here are some notes:
In a nearline application such as mine a “offline application of storage” the Terrablock is a bit overkill, in that configuring a server with storage is easier, more cost effective, and overall perfect while using compressed or anything but FULL HD or 2K/4K images.
The Terrablock is intended at being used as “online” multi user data streamed with plenty of overhead to prevent data lag on FULL HD or larger RESOLUTION MATERIAL. It has a high level PCI X Bus conneting up to Four dual channel fiber card which can deliver from 120MB up to near 300MB depending on which system you are looking at. The cards provide connection to two clients and the total clients varies per system. The cost of the additional pair of clients is about $1000.00 and extends Two clients per card.You could connect a infinate amount of clients to the storage for offline through a networked switched architecture. This could provide solutions for proxied or get and put workflow if desired.
They are also provides software for volume managment.
So for the expense you are getting a Fiber connected RAID Array which looks and functions as though it is inside your workstation. It works on one to amny HD streams in real time, and overall is plug and play. Now how much would you pay?
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