network admins enter here, NAS, SAN or SNAP server

[five.five-six]

I have an application for which I need a solution, I am looking for economical storage. I am contracting to install a NVR IP based surveillance system, (starting to love PoE) my recorder has 4 TB installed, however the customer speced out 6TB, I think they will need up wards of 20TB. I am looking for a solution that can start out at 2TB and scale in excess of 20TB, this will be dedicated storage with a GigE Rj45 interface

any ideas?

[bigmike82]

Holy crap, 20gigs?

I'd go with an iSCSI SAN. Depending on your performance needs, a SATA-based array (such as EMC/Dell's Clariion) should do. They're somewhat expensive, but you should be able to get something for 20, 30k?

What's your budget?

[five.five-six]

I would like to keep it at $2.5k built out to 2 TB..... yes, i know

like I said, this is not mission critical, and does not need to have real robust throughput. it would be nice to have the capability to employ mirroring

I am running (29) 1.3 megapixel cameras at 8 frames a second, given the application, i suspect 50% duty over 24 hours, I will have to double check with the calculator, however, at 12 IPS, it worked out to 800GB/day... at 8 IPS...? 0.5TB/day?


ETA, I am sort of baffled at how these solutions are tunning at $500-$1,000 per TB

Western Digital Caviar 1TB SATA Hard Drive * $99.99

[DiscoBayJoe]

The Iomega stuff is pretty nice on the low end.

Equallogic is the shiz, but it costs. Every feature under the sun (Snapshots, Replication, etc). Overkill for your app, unless you have high performance needs. The smallest shelfs are about $15K and a 48TB shelf is about 100K, You can grow to a dozen shelves in a cluster, soon to be more. You'll never outgrow it!

You could always run one of the software-only products on a box with a bunch of cheap drives. Check this out: http://blog.backblaze.com/2009/09/01...cloud-storage/

[five.five-six]

$117/TB.... not bad

[bigmike82]

Your best bet is *probably* to build up your own server box, and run something like FreeNas. Figure on 1k for a good server with plenty of drive space, and five or six TB drives in whatever config suits you best.

Hell, you can get 2TB drives now for under 200...get five of those for a grand, and you've got 10 TB of raw storage available.

[Digital_Boy]

I'll second what bigmike82 is saying, FreeNas + cheap SATA drives + a nice big tower enclosure and a good 1KW power supply like an Antec or some other quality piece.

All the scalable solutions start out well in excess of $2K for the bare box, let alone with any drives installed.

[odysseus]

More information is nice. You could do JBOD type implementations on the cheap for 20TB, but is it what is needed? Is 24x7 uptime a requirement? Hotswap? What level of redundancy and failure do you need? What kind of bandwidth for R/W I/O? Dynamic allocation? We can take this from a NetApp SAN/NAS device on gig ether iscsi to someone setting up a simple SCSI shelf with disks plugged into the server.

[five.five-six]

I think I am going to wuss out and get the BUFFALO 6tb terastation pro ii, it's a turnkey solution for $1600 with a 3 year warranty. it only takes up 2 rack spaces and can be expanded via it's USB port

mind you this is not a mission critical application, it's storing about 300gb a day of camera feeds, it will only be assessed in case of some trouble with the inmates

the interface is IP, I need to map a network drive. will JBOD work?

[Ghostwheel]

I think I am going to wuss out and get the BUFFALO 6tb terastation pro ii, it's a turnkey solution for $1600 with a 3 year warranty. it only takes up 2 rack spaces and can be expanded via it's USB port

mind you this is not a mission critical application, it's storing about 300gb a day of camera feeds, it will only be assessed in case of some trouble with the inmates

the interface is IP, I need to map a network drive. will JBOD work?

If data integrity is any concern, you are going to want to reconfigure that system down to 3G. It comes with 4 x 1.5TB drives configured as RAID-0 so that they can advertise it with the maximum amount of space. If a single drive fails, you lose ALL your data. RAID-0 is only useful if you need very fast drive access, and you don't care if your data is lost in a crash.

The TeraStation Pro 6TB supports RAID-5 and RAID-10, which will give different levels of recovery from drive failure. If you run RAID-5 you will have 4.5TB of storage, and you will be able to survive a single drive failure without losing data. With RAID-10 you can potentially survive a multi-drive failure, depending on which drives, and you get teh added benefit of faster drive reads and writes because parity doesn't need to be calculated with each access and you striping across drive sets.

Just my $.02

-Chris

[five.five-six]

you have to realize that the usage calculations are all over the map. my need is anywhere from 8TB for 30 days to 34TB for 60 days... depending on resolution, frame rate and actual movement in the field of view. i need to deliver 30 days of storage. if I suffer a failure, all it will be is video of people walking around..it is not like someone is going to go back and look at it... if there is an incident, more than likely, that video will be exported to optical media within 24 hrs

[Ghostwheel]

you have to realize that the usage calculations are all over the map. my need is anywhere from 8TB for 30 days to 34TB for 60 days... depending on resolution, frame rate and actual movement in the field of view. i need to deliver 30 days of storage. if I suffer a failure, all it will be is video of people walking around..it is not like someone is going to go back and look at it... if there is an incident, more than likely, that video will be exported to optical media within 24 hrs

I was just pointing out the limits of the default config in case that was a factor.

-Chris

[bigmike82]

Question.

Why don't you make a daily backup onto optical media anyway? Yeah, it'll require someone to change the discs daily...but still.

[five.five-six]

Question.

Why don't you make a daily backup onto optical media anyway? Yeah, it'll require someone to change the discs daily...but still.

I am trying to get on the good side of the IT director... they have several campuses and I would like to keep getting work