[rescue] forgive me father, for I have sinned

[Dave McGuire]

On Mar 2, 2004, at 2:16 PM, David L Kindred (Dave) wrote:
>     Joshua> Can't you upgrade it to higher capcity, smaller drives?
>
> First, the older unit has a flaky power supply (may just be a fan, but
> may not).  Second, the only application I have for a file server needs
> to be supported, and needs its software to be up-to-date and supported
> also.

   The NS6000 at SkyCache was supported.  By me.  Worked great.  It had 
a few problems here and there, and I fixed them.

   Despite the very well-trained nature of techs in our industry when it 
comes to buying overpriced, unnecessary "support" contracts, there's 
really nothing magical about vendor support...except for the fact that 
they care about the data on my machines a lot less than I do.

> As far as max drive size, I really don't know.  The older one currently
> has a range of sizes up to 9G, the newer unit uses physically smaller
> but logically larger drives.  It looks like everything is 50 pin
> cabling, but I haven't disassembled the carriers in the newer unit to
> confirm that.

   The previous-generation NS6000 took 23GB drives with no problem, and 
the NS7000 does as well.  These machines are well-designed with very 
few artificial limits.  It will Just Work.

> If someone had multiples of the exact same model system to use for
> spares, and was willing to run unsupported software you could probably
> do something with these things.  But I think you could make a *bsd or
> Linux box with many more times the horsepower and capacity for both 
> less
> money and certainly less power load.

   Not even close.  Don't underestimate the power of hardware-assisted 
RAID, dedicated processors for RAID parity, dedicated processors for 
UDP checksums and XDR encoding, hardware-assisted.  PC toyz won't be 
able to touch that, unless you spend almost as much as you paid for 
those Auspex boxes.

   It's really a matter of how serious you are about performance and 
reliability.

            -Dave

--
Dave McGuire                      "My tummy hurts now, but my soul
Cape Coral, FL                   feels a little better."     -Ed