Re: Networked raid storage and NFS


Jonathan,

These are indeed hot swappable. You can buy these chassis with hot swap SATA sleds, and the 3ware cards support auto detection when a drive is changed out. Also, not much need for tech savvy with the Open-E solution. it's quite easy to set them up.

However, your price point is very limiting. you are going to be stuck with a consumer product with perhaps some flaky limitations. I'm hoping you'll be lucky though. Post to the list what you end up with, and how it works.

Jon

JJ wrote:
<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed">Jonathan,

Thanks for your detailed response. It looks like you've found a nice solution - although it still doesn't seem to give hot-swap functionality. Also, we have all standalone boxes (no rack for rack mounting). If I felt I had more tech savvy, I might go in for this sort of solution. I'm also kind of limited to the 1-1.5K price range. I may end up regretting this choice on the "reliable" front, but I think I'm going to have to try the intel box and see what happens.

Thanks again.

-Jonathan


Jonathan Loran wrote:
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



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- _____/ _____/ / - Jonathan Loran - -
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- _____ / _____ / / Space Sciences Laboratory, UC Berkeley
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