Drobo FS and permissions

Manage permissions on the Drobo as it is not a DAS.

Welcome to distributed systems and storage.

Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) storage are "local" storage, and managed by the host. (Yes, there are extra steps involved on the host and out on the SAN storage controllers to get the storage visible to the host.)

Any storage off-host is going to have to be at least partially managed on the box that's hosting the storage. This includes dedicated Network Attached Storage (NAS) boxes, ftp and WebDAV, as well as other host operating systems (Mac OS X, Linux, OpenVMS, z/OS, whatever) that are serving up storage.

Off-host storage management requires some coordination between the remote identity and the local identity, either via mapping UID values, username and password or certificate credentials, or shared authentication via Kerberos or such.

How you establish the mapping and coordinate the identities depends on the protocols used, and the particular device or host.

AFAIK, no. Beyond its generic functions with the shares (and once the shares are presented from the controller) Server Admin would not be particularly involved; you'll be using Drobo Dashboard or such to manage the details of the device configuration.

Consider reviewing the [documentation for your Drobo FS |http://www.drobo.com/pdf/Drobo FS_UserGuide.pdf] device, as a start. That should provide an introduction to how Data Robotics expects this stuff to work with Mac OS X.

For some related materials, read [this|http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/169] and [this|http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/57] and [this|http://support.datarobotics.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/462]; and it appears that the 1.0.4 firmware is now available.

If the Drobo storage-serving software allows it, you could then look to use the Get Info tool or the bash tools chown and chmod to manage some of the details of the share. But whether these tools can change the settings depends as much on the Drobo and its services as it does on Mac OS X.

cheapest?

i've used some of these for clients. they're generally solid. use ESATA and not firewire if you can help it.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop

if you're talking about 5 to 10 TB of data, you may not want the cheapest options. also consider that you'll need backup for this pile of data. if you're looking for 10 TB, you're probably talking about 20 TB when you factor in backup and other considerations.

the cheapest option may be to build your own 3U server running linux, solaris, or one of the BSDs, and pack it full of cheap disk. nfs mount it on the server and clients, and that would probably work fine. it's obviously more work, though.