What are SAS external storage options (Promise, Infortrend, SuperMircro, ...)?

We just did this here as a test (not my blog):

http://www.natecarlson.com/2010/05/07/review-supermicros-sc847a-4u-chassis-with-36-drive-bays/

It has worked out perfectly. Using off the shelf SuperMicro pieces, we were able to build a 72TB RAW array for about $8,000 total. In hindsight, we didn't need as many SATA controllers, and we never did buy extra disks for caches, as we aren't using the Sun stuff he was talking about.

some of the supermicro backplanes (the vertical card just behind the disk bays) are in fact SAS2 switches. you can daisy-chain several of these backplanes with one or two 4-lane SAS cables and plug a lot of drives on each.

there's even a 4U 45-bay box with just a power supply and some of these on both front and back; no motherboard! Check the manual for details.

Supermicro has a bunch of well-respected SAS enclosures. I don't have personal experience with them, but have a few acquaintences that have had very good luck. They have a 16-slot model that sounds like just what you're looking for.

More than a year ago, backblaze explained how they build a 67TB server for ~8k$.

This is an interesting article, as it shows the different options they chose, as using a custom enclosure rather than buying one.

They gave all the schematics, and you can buy an enclosure here.

At the time the article was written, a petabyte was 81k$ (raw disks). Using their solution, that was only 117k$ (compared to that, dell was 820k$).

I've had good luck with the storage and server products from Aberdeen Inc. Price wise they are really hard to beat. And they come with a standard 5 year warranty that they do stand behind. It's a win win. I've been using their products for about 8 years now so I have a long relationship with the company.

Many good looking solutions were suggested.

RAID Inc. was suggested by @3dinfluence and we are going with this option.

It's a no-single-point-of-failure 6Gb SAS RAID Storage System with 24TB of 6Gb SAS drives

Dual Redundant 6Gb SAS Hot Swap RAID Controller Modules
(4) 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) Ports per Controller
2GB Cache Module per Controller
Dual Hot Swap Power Supply and Cooling Modules
Hot Swap IO Modules, Battery Units, and Management Interface Modules
12-Bay 6Gb SAS Drive Chassis, 2U Form Factor
(12) 2TB 7,200 RPM Hot Swap 6Gb Nearline SAS Drives
Sustained Performance up to 4GB/s
Pre-Read Parity Validation (To prevent against silent data corruption)
Management Software Package for Linux (LSI's SANtricity)
Scalability to a maximum of (192) SAS drives

We are going to pay around $12k and another $1k for the 2 HBAs.

It will be a turn-key solution and all the tech support and part replacement done through RAID Inc.

Thanks to everyone for the answers!

Coraid is another solution provider I would throw out there. They make a number of enclosures with super micro chassis that might fit your needs. They also seem to be doubling down on future development after closing $25 million in round B funding.

They were recently selected for an Antartic data collection project that's NASA funded, and they've been named as a storage partner by Avaya.

More information about the company and it's health can be found here.

This is a no-single-point-of-failure system. Newegg's prices would be pretty hard to beat.

• 1x $6,600 PROMISE VTE610sD (3 years limited warranty)
• 16x $270 ($4,320) Western Digital 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 7200RPM (5 years limited warranty)

Total $11k

Still need to buy the HBAs (about $300 each) and 16 Mux Cards for the SATA drives.