Building a Large SAN

[Brian D. McGrew]

Good morning all:

So we've got this recording studio and we've got somewhere around 200
external hard drives ranging in size between 100GB and 300GB.  When an
artist comes in, we plug their drive into the host, do the recording,
save it, unplug it and it's on to the next one.  We've never had a drive
fail until yesterday and fortunately, I was able to quickly recover it
but it got me to thinking...

What are the prospects of building a SAN to mirror data on to?  Since
everything else in the studio is rack mount, rack space isn't an issue
but I have two requirements that need to be addressed:

1)  Has to run Linux and be highly and quickly scalable so that I can
just plug in a drive, add it to an array and go.  I figure right now,
we're close to about 20B and add another 1TB a month.  

2)  My main requirement is that I be able to seamlessly and on-the-fly
clone the drives that we attach to the host.  The host is running Mac OS
10.3 so Samba or rsync might work.

Look for input,

-brian

Brian D. McGrew { brian at visionpro.com || brian at doubledimension.com }
--
> Those of you who think you know it all,
  really annoy those of us who do!