Storage systems

["Miguel González Castaños" <mgc@tid.es>]

Dear all,

 I am addressing to you guys, to see if you could give some ideas...

 We are dessigning a system where we will need to store loads of tiff format image
files. We havent estimated yet which will be the amount of the image files that
there will be around 40-60 Gb/ a year. The problem is that those images should be
always accesible, we have thought about to create a database system to retrieve
those images and that way to develop a kind of image file server for the rest of
applications that need to get those image files.

 The environment is using linux and systems of low cost. We presumably would use
IDE hard disk drives.

 We have consider several ways to achieve it, clustering, etc...but,  After
considering using volume striping with LVM, the problem that we envisaged is that
such image file server would be working lot of hours, that means that IDE hard
disk drives after a few years could start to have disk failures (I think they are
meant to be use around 3-5 years)...

 Then we started to think about a massive storage system for small systems...but
that choice could be a bit expensive...

 I suppose you guys maybe you should have faced the deployment of such system. We
only are thinking about other possibilites we havent taken into account.

 If massive storage systems are our solution, we would like to know which
possibilities I could found for Linux (red hat if possible).

 Sorry for the lenght of my email.

 Many thanks

 Miguel