People are drooling over Drobo
People are drooling over Drobo:
Data Robotics, Inc. | Drobo Product Specifications
Drobo Product Specifications
Four Bay Disk Interface
• 3.5″ SATA I or SATA II hard disk drives
• Full or half-height, no carriers required
• Choose the drive manufacturer, capacity (mixed capacities ok), and spindle speed or cache that fits your current storage needs
It looks like a cool device, and at $500 USD, it’s a bit pricey. I’d rather go with a more open solution that doesn’t need special software to run on the clients. Something like Openfilter:
File-based networking protocols supported by Openfiler include: NFS, SMB/CIFS, HTTP/WebDAV and FTP. Network directories supported by Openfiler include NIS, LDAP (with support for SMB/CIFS encrypted passwords), Active Directory (in native and mixed modes) and Hesiod. Authentication protocols include Kerberos 5.
Openfiler includes support for volume-based partitioning, iSCSI (target and initiator), scheduled snapshots, resource quota, and a single unified interface for share management which makes allocating shares for various network file-system protocols a breeze.