So yeah, dedicated storage servers - I generally do not like the idea of making my storage server do too much, and I don't like machines where the RAID/volume configuration is stored on the same unit as the machine serving out information. If their controllers (which are typically Xeon SoCs if I remember my dearly departed FAS2240-2) die, you are still dead in the water. They don't run standard Linux/BSD out of the box, and I am pretty sure most of the nicer features (like dual controller/seamless failover) requires licensing. This way I could have a larger array for playing with even more hard drives.Ĭlick to expand.No, Netapps, Isilons and etc are completely different beasts. Looks like a housing with 14 or 24+ backplane for 2.5' hot-swap SAS drives with double hot-swap power supplies and double redundant controllers (which look like blade CPU servers). There are SAS array SAN appliances, 'NETAPP' makes alot of them.

Ok, I think I discovered what you could have been talking about - maybe. This should get me started and running for hopefully a year or two before I outgrow that again, then figure out how I would continue to insure the safety of many terabytes of data, since it isn't like I can just grab another hard drive off the shelf and back that stuff up to that while I make another new SAN/NAS storage server. What I picked out was this hp dl360 GEN 7, it has 8 SAS drive bays, (1) Xeon 5660, and PC3 ram. In the case of the NetAPP boxes, they all have dual-redundant controllers for either load balancing or backup purposes and each of those controllers are actually a whole computer system each itself with its own ram CPU's and pci bus. I was thinking I could use ISCSI initator to attach a FreeNas box to a SAS array, but that SAS array actually has to have the whole CPU/motherboard thing on it already to manage the RAID, cache, i/o etc - so, that would defeat the purpose of an external FreeNas appliance, if I had to have another machine to manage the data that was managed by the first machine. The world is not without options, I tell you. Or they have the SAS array shelf, with 40-gigabit connectors that I can wire up to an existing server with a 40gb PCI card in it, to attach the array to that, instead of combining the big array and the server into one large electric burning heat-fan itself. This way I could have a larger array for playing with even more hard drives. Click to expand.Ok, I think I discovered what you could have been talking about - maybe.

Ram for hp dl360 g6