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Standalone RAID and NAS Systems Recent developments in RAID controllers and chassis give us a wealth of choices not seen before. RAID or NAS equipment can be purchased in a dizzying array of tower or rack mount chassis and sizes. The cost of RAID storage has dropped to the point that it is now practical to use a RAID as a high speed intermediate backup device before going to tape with a large database. Many customers are also choosing RAID as an alternative to CD/DVD jukeboxes for "near on-line" storage of infrequently used data. In fact, a recent customer discovered that a 500Gb standalone IDE RAID system was about 1/6 the cost of CD/DVD jukebox of similar capacity. For maximum performance, choose RAID systems with SCSI drives. For maximum storage at the least cost, choose RAID systems with IDE drives. In both cases, the connection to the server will be either Ultra 160 SCSI or Fibre Channel. We may also recommend a NAS device for certain purposes.
These RAID systems can be used with any OS or server architecture that supports SCSI or Fibre Channel. Many of the chassis and RAID systems are on a GSA schedule available through Creative Consultants, many new products will be added in the very near future.
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