Netwroked Storage

[Grant Peel]

Hi all,

For the past few months I have been researching methods to create a storage enclosure, perferably with out spending many 10s of k's of $'s.

The intent here is to connect about 10 Web servers, each of them hosting about 200 domains, to a central storage system to house users home directories.

I am still looking for feedback regarding what level of hardware ( how much RAM , cpu bus speed etc) people might be using for a similar setup.

The end idea is to lead FreeBSD on the storage system, create one huge /home directory, export it via NFS and share that on all the Web machines.

It might be worth noting that the Web machines host a full array of software, i.e. Mail, Web, MySQL, PHP etc.

Does anyone use a similar setup? What kind of I/O bottlenecks are created?

Any feedback would be welcome.

-Grant