> May I ask exactly what storage array you bought? Was it a MD1000?
> A new MD1000 array with 10 15k 400GB SAS disks costs $10,000.
Let me see...yeah.
You're right, I screwed up my figures. Thanks for the note.
I was able to get the MD1000 with 10 15k 450GB SAS disks plus
PowerEdge R200 servers (w/memory and processor slightly bumped from
the default) for about $7,500 a piece, not $3,500.
It's actually the 450GB SAS disks that we got, so after taking 2 out
for hotswapping, we've got (8 * 450 / 2) or 1800 GB of theoretically
super-fast storage space in the pool.
I priced it at somewhere around $10,000 on their site, as you say.
It was then quoted to us by our education sales rep at $9,000
initially, including the server. I sent a second "Request For Quote",
mentioning we're needing to upgrade two campuses, indicating that
$18,000 was a little more than we were hoping to spend, and asking her
if she could get us a deal.
She replied with a quote at about $15,000.
I don't know how much is that we're a school, how much is that we
asked as a crucial sales quota deadline approached, or how much is
that we actually *asked* for a deal, but we managed to get an okay
price on that, overall.
*HOWEVER*
When I went back to ask to buy some of the drive enclosures so we
could put some SATA disks into the array (wanted to add a cheaper,
slower, less redundant backup partition) they informed us that Dell
does not sell those pieces of plastic and steel that way; that we
would need to buy the hard disks from them in order to get the little
box that holds them right for insertion into the array.
As they charge way too much for the hard drives, I went and found out
I can get those enclosures on eBay and such for $20-$40, and go buy my
own RAID-level SATA drives from newegg or wherever and save at least
50% over the Dell price in some cases.
Explaining the economic incentives at play didn't help the sales rep
get me any better of a deal that time, though; in fact, he simply did
not even reply to my asking.
> --
> Mark Krenz
Simón
P.S. The array seems to be able to be plugged into two separate RAID
controller cards on two separate servers at the same time. Joe
mentioned something about sharing the storage across boxes; I didn't
know if you meant just over the LAN or with something like this or a
SAN.
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