I noticed a post on the Oracle-L list by Connor McDonald, who is a UKOUG stalwart and Oak Table member, about FreeNAS. It struck me how often I’ve been in a situation at work when I’ve been touting around storage vendors to get some very low cost, very high capacity storage for disk backups. It’s often a short term requirement. Judging by Connor’s comments, it sounds like it was a big success for him and might be worth bearing in mind the next time you’re in that situation. Anyway, here are his unedited comments.
“Unrelated to use of Oracle, but during a recent series of large conversions, we had need to take several backups of our database – couple of thousand bucks got us some cheapy ATA and USB disks on a PC, whacked in an FreeNAS iso image on CD and voila! A few terabytes of NFS storage…it worked an absolute treat.”