Re: James 29 Re: Small
"1TB is pretty small fry these days, wouldn't even store my data at home...." It's enough for learning with, maybe enough for creating a mirrored cluster for your MP3s, but not enough for a business to put in production. My experience is VSA clusters tend to grow and grow because they are cheap and easy to use, a bit like the old NetApp farms.
The devil is in the detail for a home cluster - you either need a whole server for each instance or a VM. Inside each node you RAID across a set of 'disks' (real or vdisks), so you really need four each per instance (you can do it with three per node but utilization is low). If you then want to do RAID10 (mirroring of vLUNs across nodes in a cluster) then you need two instances, but most people also want to play with replication between clusters so you then need two clusters of two instances (you can make single instances with RAID0 but then you have no redundancy and risk data loss). If you want to play with RAID50 then it's four or more nodes (best) per cluster. So, to build a home cluster requires quite a bit of kit and/or a lot of virtualization.