Re-purposing old arrays
A German IBM customer, the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience of Frankfurt., has dumped the EMC/Isilon O/S from three 36NL nodes and replaced it with SUSE Linux with IBM's GPFS as a filesystem.
Each node has 36 internal disk drives in a RAID-6 configuration. The InfiniBand adapters involved work with RDMA enabled for native GPFS - version 3.5.0.11 to be precise.
In effect old - 2011 era - not that old - Isilon hardware is being re-used in a 3-node cluster to function as a 55TB filestore using IBM software. Cool.
Are their other examples of storage array re-purpising that beat this in coolness factor terms?