Recommendations for Enterprise Document Storage

[ehask]

I currently have a 2TB SAN I want to use to build a document storage solution. Our current file server is choking severely as we currently store a bunch of old invoices and various files from different Depts.

It has about 600K files on it and I think it is Windows 2003 or an NTFS issue causing the slowdown at peak demand.

My plan is to move alot of the stagnant files to a this new 2TB SAN behind one of my IBM blades. I just want to find out if I should use a different OS to prevent the Quantity of files from choking the server.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Eric Haskins

[gunderstone]

Have you performed a baseline analysis of the system to determine where the choke point is?

You've indicated that "I think it is Windows 2003 or an NTFS issue causing the slowdown at peak demand" - what is the corresponding data that makes you think this?

The main reason I am asking this is that I have over 600K worth of files (total size of all the files is 300GB+) on a Windows XP system on two separate physical drives (which are not stripped)

Now I realize that there are not a ton of people connecting to the files to access them in my situation but the OS and the file system handles the number and size of all the files quite well (I will also replicate this data to external USB drives from time to time to back it up and take it out of here)

I am wondering what else might be going on with that one system.

What are the number of connections to that system?
How much data / network transfer is occuring?
Do you have another system fairly close to size and scope? If so how does it handle the load?