[plug] SAN Advice

[Paul Antoine]

I agree re ReiserFS in particular, and early versions of XFS and JFS. I 
must admit I've not kept up with ext3 developments that have obviously 
made it more competitive than when I was last involved in benchmarking 
it.  At the time we were building a mail server to handle 100's of 
thousands of users and the lack of hashed directories was a serious 
performance problem.

Terabyte filesystems are now trivially easy to build even without LVM!
Yay for 1TB drives... we've never had the ability to lose so much data 
so quickly :-)

P.

Cameron Patrick wrote:
> Paul Antoine wrote:
> 
>> I'd run JFS as filesystem under Linux which allows for online filesystem 
>>  growth (the RAID card will do the online RAID volume expansion.)
> 
> Just a comment: my past experiences with XFS and Reiserfs have led me to
> be leery of anything that's not ext3 under Linux.  These days ext3 also
> does online expansion and hashed directories (so directories with large
> numbers of files don't suck like they used to).  It's the most popular
> filesystem so gets the most testing and is least likely to lead to weird
> behaviour - though that's not to say that it's not possible, as a few
> people on this list have discovered in the past.
> 
> Another thing to look at is LVM - which I presume anyone looking at
> terabytes of storage will already be familiar with!
> 
> Cameron (who has never been involved with large-scale SAN/NAS systems
> but has set up and maintained a couple of smaller file servers.)
> 
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