Im going to be consolidating several 'server rooms' into a single installation soon. Part of this effort will be finding a home for 5Tb (and growing) of files / logs. To this end Im looking at Lustre and appreciating its ability to scale.

The big vendors want to sell me a $20K SAN to manage this but Im wondering about buying several iSCSI units (like this http://www.asacomputers.com/3U-iSCSI-Solution.html) and using VMs for the OSS machines. This would let me fail-over to cover problems and not require a dedicated system for each OSS.

Given articles like this (http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/RAID-Is-Dead-Long-Live-RAID/ba-p/1422) that talk about how RAID is not keeping up with drive density Im leaning towards more disks with lower capacity each. Again - some akin to the iSCSI array above.

Tell me why this is a terrible idea. Do I really need to invest in a PE710 for each OSS/OST?