[plug] SAN Advice

[Phillip Bennett]

Just a thought, but have you looked at ATA over Ethernet (AoE)?

Have a look at www.coraid.com, specifically the SR1521.  With 2 GigE ports 
hooked up, speed is pretty good.  Also, they use SATA-II drives, so they're 
fairly cheap for disks.

The drivers are included in most major Linux distros and they are said to be 
very good at scaling; simply add more boxes.

>From what I've read in this thread, it'd suit your needs and hopefully not 
break the budget.  I've priced one previously for £4439 @ 4.5TB (using 8 
disks).  With the exchange rate what it is now, you should be well under the 
$25k budget!

I'm not sure if there is an Oz distributer or if you'd have to go direct, so 
it might not be the best situation.  As I say though, it's just a thought.

Phil.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Paul Antoine" <pma-la at milleng.com.au>
To: <plug at plug.org.au>
Sent: Friday, October 26, 2007 6:57 AM
Subject: Re: [plug] SAN Advice


>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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