This might be a bit off the wall, but is is possible to take, for instance, an old Powervault (Dell NAS box) and use multiple ones as part of an LVM group?

These are actually pretty reasonable and it could be configured as such:

Powervault: 4x250GB (RAID 5)
Powervault2: 4x250GB (RAID 5)

Could those then be combined into an LVM group seeing a total of 2 "drives" of 750GB each? Essentially a 1.5TB RAID array, but each subsystem would be it's on RAID5 group.

I've been playing around with better ways to add storage. Right now I am playing with Firewire, but the latest 2.6 kernel has some 1394 issues with some adapters. It's becoming quite a pain in the rear to find a good box with dual channel firewire bridges that work. At least, I can't find a definite answer to "buy XX because it will 100% work in 2.6".

Anyway, thoughts on this setup? I'd like to find a nice rackmount solution and finding just a good NAS distro has been a bit of a pain. Of couse, I could aways build one, but I don't quite have that much free time at the moment, so a nice pre-packaged NAS solution would be a nice to have. The above question still applies though: would multiple NAS boxes work under LVM.

Thanks for the feedback.

If Linux recognises the device as a blockdevice, then it can be used with LVM. I have never worked with NAS boxes, but I take it these present the storage as NFS of SMB shares? In that case they are not blockdevices and can therefore not be used with LVM. If they are SAN or DAS boxes (connect through SCSI) then they are blockdevices and LVM can be applied. iSCSI may be seen as a blockdevice, but that's also something I have never worked with.

ATAoE perhaps....

_________________
cesman

When the source is open, the possibilities are endless!

They are not block devices, rather networked storage. So, they would be (I assume) SMB shares for linux? I guess this would look the same as connecting to the videos location on a remote Myth box, but again, adding LVM is the kicker,

Do you already own the PowerVault boxes or do you want to buy them? If you intend to buy them then I'd suggest getting a hardware RAID SATA controller of 3ware and add let's say four 400GB SATA disks to get the 1.5 TB you mentioned before. Should fit in the budget if you were already considering buying the PowerVault boxes.

EDIT:

If you want a rackmountable solution, then you need to fit the suggestion above in a rackmount server housing. I suppose Dell, HP, SuperMicro et.al offer rackmount servers that come with RAID5 connected disks already offering lots of storage. But again it all depends on your budget.