Do you know of a relatively inexpensive way to add a few terabytes of storage to my network?
Performance isn't much of a concern because I want to store only replicated data, which I don't plan to back up. The original data resides on Windows 2000 servers and Network Appliance (NetApp) filers, and I plan to use VERITAS Software's VERITAS Storage Replicator to perform scheduled data replication to the storage device.
Probably the least expensive way to approach this situation is to use IDE RAID. I'm usually not an advocate of using IDE on servers, but if performance isn't a concern, this might be the best approach. Check out Promise Technology's UltraTrak RM8000 or SX8000 series of external RAID controllers. I've used the UltraTrak RM8000 in conjunction with Maxtor's MaXLine Plus II 250GB hard disks with good results and surprisingly good performance. Just one UltraTrak RM8000 with eight 250GB disks in a RAID 5 configuration will give you more than 1.5TB of storage, and I've successfully added two RM8000s to one machine.
I'm curious, though, about your comment that you plan to use VERITAS Storage Replicator to replicate data from your NetApp filers. To my knowledge, these products won't work together. However, I've used applications such as Xcopy to schedule an incremental copy of NetApp filers, and replication tools such as LEGATO Systems' RepliStor might work in your environment.
