Does anyone here have experience with either of these two systems? It seems that everything I read on these units on the web is geared towards systems that need to use them with virtual machines. For the hardware part of a persistence market data store in a realtime data environment where all you are doing is storing data for later analysis, the Lefthand system seems inferior to me to the Netapp, but there is so much noise with poorly qualified articles on the net that I can't tell which is the better solution from a simple market data store appliance. Then there are other systems from Dell, Fujitsu, EMC, etc..
I am even thinking of getting either the proliant servers that the Lefthand systems are based on, or even a SuperMicro similar box, and just using http://www.nexenta.com/corp/index.php <object style="height: 390px; width: 640px"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XLOEfW8BgbM?version=3&feature=player_detailpage"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XLOEfW8BgbM?version=3&feature=player_detailpage" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="640" height="360"></object>
It depends... iSCSI and SAN is really going to be focused on a datacenter environment with some type of virtualization. NAS on the other hand is going to be much more similar to a home/small-office network appliance (think a drobo or D-Link or whatever cheaper retail product). What are you trying to do with this? For reference, I just quoted $1,900 (and am building) a 10TB storage server for a client . That's with a good RAID card and the works. Do you want a dumb "network appliance" or do you want something with an operating system (like Windows 7/Server and a massive hard drive)? Do you want something that's CLI (command line interface) or web-GUI or desktop? Are you just taking in market data and then writing a copy of it into a historical database? Is this realtime (meaning you receive the data and then split it - one copy to your real-time system and one copy write to HDD) or are you going back after-hours and pulling the data after the close? What is your budget? Some of the hardware you are mentioning is quite expensive. Do just want to dump data somewhere? Will you want to access this data locally or over a network (internal LAN or over internet WAN?)?? Would you ideally like to optimize on the same machine that the data is stored or do you just want a simple data repository that can be accessed by other optimization and backtest machines and/or execution machines? Are you looking to rack-mount this or are you looking for a tower or stand-alone unit? Have you looked at FreeNAS (free, open-sourced)? Keep in mind that the applications and operating systems you are looking at are just that - applications and OS. They are not based on any type of hardware and you don't need Proliant or Super-O boxes to run these applications. Sorry for the long-ish post with 20-questions. Hopefully some of this makes sense. The price I mentioned above is for a data repository only, housed in a stand-alone tower server and that price is for hardware build and database config. You don't need anything crazy and at $190 per terabyte that's a pretty darn good deal. But this machine will not be able to do any optimization, just house the data. It'll write real-time feeds to HDD and then be accessed later for optimization and modeling.