Building a custom and cheap storage server yourself – Part II
It´s been a few months since posting the idea of building a custom made storage system in my blog. During this time we convinced people to give our idea a try, did some minor changes to the box layout and ordered the parts. Finally they arrived at 27th December 2009.
So this is part II of the project called “Building a custom and cheap storage server yourself”. For people dont know what i am talking about: part I can be found here and part III here.
Building the box
We had a budget of approx 12.000 euros for building the prototype of the storage box. We decided to build the prototype with 40 disks from the start and fit an SAN-HBA in it to try COMSTAR (this enables us to export the storage via SAN to other servers). As operating system we choose Open Solaris. Two disks are dedicated to the operating system and are attached directly to the mainboard. The remaining 38 disks are attached to either one Adaptec 52445 or one Adaptec 51645 controller.
Below are some pictures of the components and the final assembled box. Click on the image for a larger version:
