Cross-Platform Company Storage Architecture?

Eric^2 asks: "My company is preparing to implement a major network storage upgrade, and I'd like to get some ideas from Slashdot about what devices should be considered, and hopefully some experiences with some of the offerings that are available. What types of storage are you using and what would you recommend?"

"We are currently using approximately 2TB of storage space, and will need to expand to over 10TB in the next two to three years. We have a mix of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux clients and servers. All of our authentication is presently done through an Active Directory. If possible, we would like to centralize all of the storage into a single namespace, such as OpenAFS or DFS. Anything we purchase will have to be under maintenance contract for hardware such as failed drives or controllers. Ideally, whatever system we choose would allow us to purchase both high-speed SCSI spindles for our transactional needs and lower-speed SATA high capacity drives for our archival storage needs."

Consider Apple's XServe RAID and XSan

[Alowishus]

I went through this decision process at a civil engineering firm with 3TB of data. We wound up building a SAN out of XServe RAID cabinets, QLogic SANbox switches, XSan software for the OS X machines and ADIC's StorNext FX software for the Linux and Windows. XSan/StorNext is a shared filesystem, which inherently gets you a combined namespace without any DFS-type machinations. All servers literally mount the very same volume and access it simultaneously.

XSan is really the deal of the century - you can build a full-blown StorNext system starting with ADIC's software, but that approach can be exceptionally expensive. Instead, start with XSan (which is a functional but slightly stripped version of StorNext) and then use ADIC's much less expensive StorNext FX client licenses for each non OS X server that needs to join.

Redundancy can be everywhere. Start with a pair of redundant XServes as metadata controllers. Add a pair of redundant SAN switches. Apple's FiberChannel HBAs are all dual channel, as are the XServe RAID cabinets. For any non-Apple hardware, buy dual channel QLogic HBAs.

Apple provides a variety of maintenance contracts for all their hardware, as does QLogic. ADIC and Apple provide support maintenance agreements for the software. The only missing piece of your equation is SCSI-based storage. But since this whole system is entirely standards-based, all you need to do is find a favorite vendor of SCSI FiberChannel cabinets and drop a few into your SAN and then partition them accordingly, right along with all the SATA storage.

It's a beautiful system, and a raging bargain compared to every other comparable solution I've investigated.

Application ?

[pwet]

you forgot the most important : what are you using your storage for ?