Computing@Thayer

Almost from the day our NetApp (ThayerFS) was powered up, we’ve been on the hunt for a cheaper file server alternative. We’re very pleased with the functionality of the NetApp, but dollar per gigabyte and several seemingly arbitrary limitations left us curious of alternative options.

The cost of our NetApp storage is a little fuzzy. Over the years, we’ve come up with calculations from around 2.50 – 12 dollars per gigabyte. But if you head over to NewEgg and buy a stand-alone 2 terabyte enterprise SATA drive, it is only $0.16 per raw gigabyte. Obviously there is a fair amount of additional hardware and software required to make that drive available on the network. So the question is, how can cheap can make a file server that still has respectable features, availability, and performance.

We’ve planned a system that comes out to about $0.28/GB raw and $0.37/GB usable. If the system works well, our plan is to buy a near identical system that we’ll use for backup. So backed up, the cost will be double, or about $0.84 per usable gigabyte. While this is many times more than the cost of a raw drive, it is significantly cheaper than the alternatives that we explored.

Over the next few blog posts, I’ll give some details of the options we investigated, what we’ve ultimately decided to go with, and how the implementation actually works out.

Update: The original price per GB I used was assuming we would buy a spare part of almost every electronic component (motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc.). I’ve updated it to reflect the price without any spares parts, which is still slightly misleading, as we will buy some spare parts. The price is also based on a fully populated system. However, we will initially only have a system that is 25% populated. At the beginning, this pushes the $/GB up, but because $/GB of hard drives is going down over time, by the time the system is fully populated, it will actually be lower than above quoted price.

Go to part two of the Cheap Storage Project series.