I’m floored by what “Enterprise Storage Solutions” cost.  $40,000 to $50,000 will buy you a fully redundant, fault-tolerant system in an integrated package with something approaching 20TB of storage.  However, we can get 90% of the functionality for under $6,000 and 95% of it for under $8,000.  For smaller businesses with big storage needs (such as graphics design firms), here’s what I’d do instead:

Parts List:

• 4 Sans Digital eSATA 5-bay RAID enclosure (Newegg: N82E16816111057 $200 each)
• 20 2 TB hard drives (Newegg: N82E16822136494 $160 each)
• Server:  $1,500 from Dell, HP or anyone else running Linux and Samba.
• 2 dual-port eSATA cards (Newegg: N82E16816132020 $25 each)

What you end up with:

• 40 TB of raw storage configured as 4 RAID-5 fault-tolerant file storage spaces available to Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux clients.
• 29.8 TB of USABLE storage space
• Total cost of $5,550 + tax and shipping charges.

For complete fault tolerance buy a second server, eSATA cards, a couple of spare drives and a spare enclosure.  You STILL come out under $8,000.

You get 50% more space than the “integrated solution” vendors are offering for 20% or less of the cost.  That’s just messed up in my opinion.