Re: Networked raid storage and NFS

How much money can you spend? I have been through a whole lot of iterations trying to find reliable cheap storage, and this is what we've been doing lately:

Get an x86 server class system, such as these:

http://www.siliconmechanics.com/

You can pretty much build anything from a 500GB to 15TB server in one chassis out of these. Install a decent 3ware RAID card. The newer 3ware cards are actually very good.

Then get a DOM (Disk on Module) from these guys (Silicon Mechanics will sell you this as well):

http://www.open-e.com

The Open-E solution turns your commodity x86 box into a SAN or NAS server, with a simple web interface. They pre-install the 3ware 3dm2 web management interface with their product, so you can monitor drive failures, handle drive replacements, schedule RAID verifies, etc. You can set up the device in about 1/2 hour, and be ready to roll. You should be able to put together a 1.5TB server for a $3-4K pretty easily.

BTW: Since you're a Solaris person, we are now running zfs on a 10TB Open-E iSCSI R-3 box, and it absolutely smokes. With a powerful enough x86 Solaris server, you could see near 200MB/sec write speeds with 15 IO streams. Not sure about NFS speeds though. Not a lot of experience with that. But using a Solaris system as the head node, and an iSCSI SAN back side works really well.

Jon

JJ wrote:
<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">Maxim S. Shatskih wrote:
Buy a generic computer, install 4 drives there and your favourite Linux
distro.

Is this bad?


Thanks for your input, but...

... that will not give me hot-swap capability. Plus it gives me the overhead of worrying about another whole linux system (and my linux sysadmin skills are marginal, I'm much better with Solaris). We actually do have some internal raids like this on some of our linux systems, and they're a pain to deal with if you lose a disk. We also have 12-disk external raid box with hot swap capability hooked up to a Sun and it's so simple to deal with if a single disk goes south. Unfortunately, the size of the disks is small and going the Sun route is prohibitively expensive right now.

I started my search by just looking for a raid card and external box with hot-swap capability that I could hook up to one of our existing linux boxes, but again, most of the stuff I found seemed to be geared toward windows. I'm no linux guru, and when faced with installing cards, flashing bios, installing drivers (if they exist), etc, I was a bit daunted. When I heard about a standalone networked solution, it seemed ideal. Also, a lot of the good-looking raid cards were PCIe, and we don't seem to have that type of slot on our linux boxes. Others were so expensive as to be prohibitive.

Also, one of my colleagues previously set up a raid in an external box hooked to a linux machine (he was much more profficient than me at linux admin) and it crashed and burned at some point. We never could figure out exactly why, but it was suggested that it was somehow linked with having the raid card and the disks powered by different power supplies. That could be a totally bogus conclusion, but it does make me leary.

Anyway. These standalone networked stoarge devices seem a simple and reasonably priced alternative - if they will do what they seem to promise.

So if anyone has any input on any of the models mentioned, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks.

-Jonathan

</div>

--


- _____/ _____/ / - Jonathan Loran - -
- / / / IT Manager -
- _____ / _____ / / Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley
- / / / (510) 643-5146 jloran@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- ______/ ______/ ______/ AST:7731^29u18e3




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