[Discuss] NAS: buy vs. buil

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

I have two other requirements that at least until now have favored "build" rather than "buy": encryption at rest and incremental upgradability. By the latter, I mean being able to expand storage by adding or replacing one or more of the drives vs. swapping out a whole chassis.

What I really want is an open-source equivalent of the Isilon system. You build up a NAS system as 3 or more of these auto-replicating chasses. But EMC bought that company out, and even back in their early days it was a high-priced system (albeit half the price per-gig of anything EMC).

In the future I'd like to have replication to cloud systems I manage myself, once the price of cloud servers comes down and fiber-optic gigabit Internet comes to my house. Hopefully I don't have to move to Korea where you can already do that. :-/ So the cluster-software management tools should work the same on local hardware as cloud servers. There's not much investment in that niche anymore, though.

-rich