Without having to have a 4TB Snapshot sitting there, just waiting to be used.

The reason I ask is so that should something afflict the VM C partition that I have some way to recover more rapidly that our Buffalo drive.

I wonder if I could use NAUBackup to snapshot a specific partition rather than the entire VM.

True, and I'd still be using the same appliance I have, and I suppose I could have 2 partitions on the VM the "C" drive for the OS, and a "D" for data with shares under it.

So build a massive XenServer with ton's of local SSD storage and then migrate the data into the VM. Consolidating it all into a single VM.

I'd really need a much larger CIFS file server to make my backups then ..... haha

The CPU and memory were bare minimums to have from xbyte so... why not.

As for the drives they are physical file shares at the moment... so yeah....

All in, with 16GB of Memory and Dual Xeon at 1.8 GHz with 4 of the drives the price for this unit would be $4190.96

We'd then have to move all of our data over to it, remap our shares, and have our backup appliance backup a single server...

Doesn't seem horrible. But how does one move 4TB of data (from different servers) all to one server?

4 bay or 8 bay chassis?

I'm assuming you went with five 2TB drives from Amazon in RAID 5 would would give me 8TB usable.

Correct?

Scott what chassis and drives were you looking at, I can't find anything under $4000 grand all in.

Scott on dells site I don't even see an option for a 1 or 2TB SSD.

What were you looking at when pricing?

How much do you want to bet that the SAN that is being proposed will be on Spinning Rust? I don't have any details yet, but will fill you in when I get them (likely when everything has already been bought . . . )

Ah well that makes a lot more sense.

Why wouldn't you use RAID10 with SSD's? I must've missed the article.

Which the MSP is again recommending RAID5. . . . ... . .

And if we wanted a true 6TB of usable space in RAID10, we'd need 12 drives.

I know it's a consumer grade unit, but the unit has 1 internal bay for "Backup" making it 7 (even though that would be stupid as all gitup).

Which is still not worth it to dig any further for a 6TB SSD NAS.

But just so it's out there: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994147

and 6 of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147362

I didn't go any further, it wasn't worth the time.

Ha

I just priced a unit for about the same cost for just the chassis and the drives.