Commodity based SANs

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Introduction

The computer industry ebbs and flows between centralization and decentralization of services. Today, it's hot to decentralize storage across Fiber Channel SANs, the architecture resembling a mixing metaphor of "clustering" and "networking." This new market provides the ability for a reasearch group (or a company) to purchase resources in small increments, file, backup, and caching storage solutions.

The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute recently made a move into the commodity based SAN market via Apple's XServe, XRaid, and soon to be XSan. The talk zips through (in 30 minutes) how SCI arrived at this decision, what is SCI's current setup, and where SCI plans to go. The talk will wind down with a roundtable discussion.