[Bioclusters] mid range storage solutions

[Bonnie Hurwitz]

Hi all,

I was just wondering if anyone has a recommendation for mid-range  
storage.  We need to purchase a storage server for our cluster to act  
as a mySQL database server that has around 32 terabytes of disk space  
utilizing Raid10.  Also, we are looking for fast disks and a 10-20Gb  
card since this is meant for a database server and we want to try to  
minimize resource contention from writing to the db server from the  
nodes.  We currently have 500 nodes on our cluster.

What are people currently using for similar database servers?  What  
has the performance been like when writing to the databases from  
compute nodes?

What other options are out there?

Also, we need to minimize rack space.  We currently have about 7U of  
space we can use at the moment.

-Bonnie