Cheap mass storage for business. build or buy?

[rudy23]

Hello all. its been a while since i dropped by but tech needs always drag me back to the friendly folks here.

I work for a small business and we host financial sites for various customers.

recently we started a new project which is creating backup files which are eating up space on our network attached storage at a very rapid rate.

I have been asked to look for a storage solution which is cheap, reliable and can scale to multiple terabytes.

Raid would be a must but speed is not very critical.

Primary use of this will be to be kept in an offsite location where it will receive backup images from a production site on a regular basis via ftp or sftp.

Hopefully the solution can expand or storage can be increased by patching servers together?

Solutions that i was thinking of

1. commercial storage servers. (tend to be very expensive)
2. build storage server with commodity terabyte sized drives. (is it worth the effort)
3. just attached USB external drives to some PC. (this is pretty tacky)

The solution should be easy to manage with minimal maintenance needed.

Approximate budget $5000.00 Storage Space needed approx 20 TB.

Any help and assistance would be greatly appreciated.

 

[IBDoomed]

That's funny. I just did the same sort of thing last week. I needed a new file storage server so I just tossed the cheapest c2q on a reliable gigabyte board into a norco 4020 case with 20 1tb WD's and it came in just under $5000. I used RE3 drives though and it only comes to about 16tb usable but if you use 1.5tb drives... I have a couple of promise 16bay SAN's and they were just so expensive.

 

[rudy23]

Thanks a lot. The norco case looks pretty good actually.

I am excited but I dont wanna put the company data on something i build myself. Its a lot of fun but too much risk.

What we decided to do was get one of those dell 2970 servers which have 8 drive bays and setup linux on it.

Additionally we will attach a tape storage system to the main unit and use that to remove data from the main server as it starts piling up.

Any recommendation on tape backup systems? nothing too fancy. refurb should work too.