As the company I work with has to store many media files, backups, rapidly changing documents and so on, they used to run a NetworkAppliance FAS2020 storage machine, which is quite neat. Unfortunately, the current setup does not allow to scale the volumes any more. So we needed to find an alternative.
Consequently we asked for quotes on bigger NetApp devices. Unfortunately, they cost more than a good car. The investigation on other solutions began… 
After doing some research and testing as well performance as failure behaviour, the decision was made: I will setup a storage cluster based on i386 hardware and GlusterFS. Its speed was quite impressive. And also the fact that mirroring (for data security) and striping (for performance) can be combined, is very convincing.
We will start with two huge servers which run partly in mirrored and partly in striped mode. The only thing which needs to be tested before hand is, if FreeBSD’s UFS in combination with its snapshot feature makes sense here (this could be a bit tricky). If it works, this solution will be as good as the proprietary offer. But it costs less than 1/5!
I will keep you posted.
