[Bioclusters] file server for cluster

[William Park]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 06:22:39PM -0400, Ivo Grosse wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> we want to buy a new fileserver (for our cluster) with about 1 TB, and 
> we are thinking of a Linux machine.  My question is: which kind of 
> fileserver do YOU use (and why)?
> (a) NAS (network-attached storage)?
> (b) regular Linux machine with internal RAID?
> (c) regular Linux machine with external RAID?

Actually, they are different names for basically the same thing -- lots of
harddisks that can be mounted over the net.  NAS is a dedicated NFS server,
so there is no need for DNS, Sendmail, Apache, IPtables, etc.  

For IDE solution, 8 x 120GB is ideal because you can use 2 channels from
the motherboard and 6 channels from Promise card.  If backup is not of an
issue, then you can put 2 disks on the same IDE channels and you only need
4 IDE channels.  For SCSI solution, multiply the cost by 4x. :-)

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
8 CPU cluster, NAS, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Tin