Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!ub!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!leadley From: leadley@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Scott Leadley) Newsgroups: comp.unix.large Subject: Cheap disk farms [was: Looking for Optical Disk Jukebox] Keywords: magneto optical jukebox Message-ID: <9571@ur-cc.UUCP> Date: 20 Sep 90 15:21:02 GMT References: <9528@ur-cc.UUCP> Organization: University of Rochester, Rochester NY Lines: 64 In article grl@brb.dmt.csiro.au (Greg Lehmann) writes: >leadley@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Scott Leadley) writes: >> Pinnacle Micro, sells a 6GB, 10 disk jukebox for approximately $10K. >>I've used one of their single disk systems but have no experience with this >>product. > ... a REO 1300 [a dual disk system, not a jukebox] > ... has the nice feature of being >able to access two sides on the 2 disks as a single filesystem. This means >you can have 500MB file-systems instead of the usual 250MB (per side) ones. >I don't know if you can have the 50 disk juke-box configured to do this. The advertisement I saw implies that with a custom driver (which they can supply) you can bind all surfaces together as a large virtual disk. I like this feature, but would only use it in situtations where picker thrashing on files spanning surface boundaries was unlikely or unimportant (i.e. you have LOTS of time). Pinnacle's sales address is: Pinnacle Micro 15265 Alton Pkwy. Irvine, CA 92718 voice (outside CA): (800)533-7070 voice (inside CA): (714)727-3300 If you need reasonable response time along with the advantages of a large virtual disk and cheap magneto optical storage, you need to a system that caches files in use on a magnetic disk (commonly refered to as "staging"). There are two vendors that I know of selling integrated NFS servers using magneto optical storage and staging: Epoch Systems 313 Boston Post Rd. West Marlborough, MA 01752 voice: (800)US-EPOCH Zetaco 6850 Shady Oak Rd. Eden Praire, MN 55344 voice: (612)941-9480 FAX: (612)941-1395 Anyone interested in those systems might also be interested in the NFS server from: Auspex Systems 2952 Bunker Hill Lane Santa Clara, CA 95054 voice: (408)492-0900 FAX: (408)492-0909 email: sales@auspex.com or uunet!auspex!sales that uses SCSI disk arrays. Now what I'd like are reviews from people who have actually managed an Epoch I (Epoch Systems), NETstor Server (Zetaco) or NS 5000 (Auspex Systems). -- Scott Leadley - leadley@cc.rochester.edu