I do not normally get too excited or geeked-out over equipment but today I helped a client install Coraid LINUX and setup a SAN for her data – she does statistical work and needs to store and access billions of records in pretty simple tables for analysis.
WOW! Coraid is cool. My client will likely buy one of their appliances but we went to prove it out with the open-source package (designed for there appliances and so only for x86_64). If I can install and configure this, you can rest assured it is not overly complex.
Not as fast as a SAN but still pretty fast. Imagine adding unlimited usable TBs (nfs) for just over 2x the street price of a reasonable SATA drive …
http://support.coraid.com/support/cln/faq.html
