W hat do you do when you have a Dell Linux cluster, and you need to add more storage? If you want the least expensive RAID solution, you turn to Apple, according to a bunch of Aussie rocket scientists. Linuxworld.com is reporting that the Swinburne University of Technologyis Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing has purchased six Xserve RAID units from Apple for use with its 130-node Dell Linux cluster. The reason, according to the centreis director, Professor Matthew Bailes, is that Apple offered the biggest bang for the buck. From Linuxworld.com:
"We looked at upgrading the supercomputer but that would have been too expensive for what we needed," Professor Bailes said. "Although we donit have much to do with Apple, after seeing its new Xserve RAID storage device we decided to evaluate it."
After performing an initial evaluation of a 2.52TB Xserve RAID, Bailes was happy with its performance and price.
"The Xserve RAID is the cheapest system of its type and none of the other mainstream players have a comparable price," he said. "Also, at around 100Mbps read and write to disk, it is faster than our SCSI system which has an I/O of 50Mbps."
The centre purchased six Xserve RAID systems with a combined storage capacity of 13.2TB for "around $100,000 including education and volume discounts."
The article goes on to say that though Apple expressed skepticism at the Xserve working with Linux, the University was able to get it running in "about 15 minutes." Thereis more in the full article, and we recommend it as a good read.