Does any one know of some storage box like the Dell PowerVault MD3000 but that uses SATA drives?

Our bulk (cheap & slow) storage needs at work are growing, and we'd also like to centerlize it (easier managment & control, better over all utilization) from lots of little boxes here and there to a few big boxes.

Thanks oh source of all knowledge.

HP has the MSA series here. The MSA X0 series are just disk enclosures that would plug either into a server, or a SAN controller, and a few of them use SATA drives. If you wanted to have them all in a RAID on fiber, you can pick up an MSA 1500 to plug them into, otherwise they would need to be attached to a RAID card in a server.

I picked up a SnapServer 520, which is a middle of the road NAS using SATA drives. I think it was $2500 for a 4 drive, 1tb device.

I was sold on the expandability. Simply add SANbloc S50 JBODs for up to 30 tb (or 60 tb? it's a little confusing). Now one NAS device can manage all my storage for many years to come.

Runs Guardian OS Linux but easily works in Windows, Unix, and other environments. Comes with BakBone Netvault to receive backups directly from clients (without going through a "media server"). It has an external SCSI port to send data to a tape drive or autoloader. Redundant power supplies and network cards, all in a 1U form factor (but it's really really long).

Good luck.

Thanks guys, some interesting suggestions.
Spent way to much time today looking at enterprise level storage to run our VMware ESX servers off of - trying to narrow the field a bit before we start bring in sales guys. This decision may drive our cheap storage decision - ie keep the interface the same, and interoperability.

Back up wise we're not that concerned, most of our data gets old very quickly & can also be reproduced easily. Having said that there are certain bits of data that we can't lose and we currently have a less then ideal backup store for IMO. But that is next years worry.