Marc's questions

We have a netgear readynas pro with 6 drives. It's configured using netgear's X-RAID2 format, which is (I think) similar to RAID 5. The NAS is almost completely full, and needs to be cleaned up and archived, so we are asking our lab members to copy all their data off the drive and archive what they aren't actively using.

We're then going to back up the NAS and wipe it, and let people put the data they are still actively using back on.

Instead of copying the data from the NAS onto drives (using e.g. rsync), I am wondering if I can just label the drives and put them in a box, then install new drives in the NAS. This would also allow us to expand the capacity, and I would hope that if we needed to access the old data, we could just put the old drives back in a readynas shell.

My concern is I don't know how sensitive this would be to "something changing" Could we put the disks back in any readynas pro shell, or would it have to be the one we originally took them out of? If we updated the firmware, would this prevent us from accessing the data again?

I'm looking to buy a workstation for data processing using MATLAB. I'm considering one of two workstations from DELL. The lower end workstation (3500) has a single processor and 24 GB of memory in 6 DIMMs. The higher end (7500) will only allow me to select 24 GB of memory (in 12 DIMMs) if I select the dual-processor option. The difference between the two seems to be that

The Dell Precision T3500 has a three channel memory bus architecture.

The Dell Precision T7500 has a three channel memory bus architecture per processor

Does this mean that each processor gets 12 GB of memory, and a thread on processor A can't see the same memory as processor B? This seems unlikely, but maybe there is a performance penalty for A to access B's memory?

this is related to this post:

Scalable (> 24 TB) NAS for research department

but perhaps a little more general.

Background:

We're a research lab of around 10 people who do a lot of experiments that involve taking pictures at one of several lab setups and then analyzing it an one of several lab computers. Each experiment may produce 2 or 3 GB of data, and we are generating data at the rate of about 10 TB/year.

Right now, we are storing the data on a 6-bay netgear readynas pro, but even with 2 TB drive, this only gives us 10 TB of storage. Also, right now we are not backing up at all. Our short term backup plan is to get a second readynas, put it in a different building and mirror the one drive onto the other. Obviously, this is somewhat non-ideal.

Our options:

1) We can pay our university $400/ TB /year for "backed up" online storage. We trust them more than we trust us, but not a whole lot.

2) We can continue to buy small NASs and mirror them between offices. One limit, although stupid, is that we don't have an unlimited number of ethernet jacks.

3) We can try to implement our own data storage solution, which is why I'm asking you guys.

One thing to consider is that we're a very transient population and none of us are network administration experts. I will probably be here only another year or so, and graduate students, who are here the longest, have a 5-6 year time scale. So nothing can require expert oversight.

Our data transfer rates are low - most of the data will just sit on the server waiting for someone to look at it once or twice - so we don't need a really high speed system.

Given these contraints, can someone recommend a fairly low-cost, scalable, more or less turn key shared data storage system with backup in a separate physical location. Does such a thing exist or should we just pay the university to take care of it for us?

As a second question, our professor just got tenure and is putting together a budget. Here the goal is to ask for as much as you can and hope you get a fraction of it. So the same question, minus the low-cost. Without budget constraints, can you recommend a scalable turn-key backed up storage system.

Thanks