[nflug] Opinions on Linux and Massive Storage

[David J. Andruczyk]

Depending on your performance needs and budget you might want to look at http://www.bluearc.com/ , (Titan series).  They are one of the most powerfull NAS boxes out there.  Basically EVERYTHING in the box is done in hardware (in FPGA's), unlike others like netapp (which is basically a glorified AMD server with a custom freebsd-ish OS on it and SOFTWARE RAID!)   We tested a high end netapp, and it performed abysmally.  The Titan siliconservers scale like mad, and are VERY VERY high performance (they are also pricey,  but you didn't give much detail in what you intended to accomplish).    We have a new 40 TB unit at work, and have sustained disk throughput of 950MB/sec during testing (9700Gbits/sec) to the system and it wasnt even breathing hard.  Space Scalability tops at up to 4PB, can come with multiple (2) 10GB ethernet ports. and they can be clustered to 8 units across.