[NCLUG] Terabyte Server Question

[David W. Graham]

Ok,  Here is one:

Curently the company has been using a peer to peer network full of shared
(Windows 98/NT/2000) hard drives.  We do lots of image processing and it
make sense to put large images being processed on local machines.  The
company is at the point where it now has some large data sets that are used
as the basis of several products.  Over time the drives on local machines
have been upgraded to raids.  Now there is the situation where there is
terabytes of data scattered across ~30 windows computers with no good way to
access it.  There is a processing trafic jam as everyone is cross sharing
everyone elses drives for thier processing needs.

So here is the question:

1) If we wanted to move some of the finished data sets to a server, what
would that server look like?  These would be primarily read only and the
basis for many products that the production staff would work on.  This is
about 4 Terabytes of data.

2) How would we prevent a traffic jam right infront of the server?  The
entire network is a switch 100 Ethernet.

Our IT guy came up with a Window's solution.  I would like to introduce
ideas that are a bit outside _that_ box.

Dave Graham
information integration and imaging, LLC.
dgraham at i3.com
http://www.i3.com