Re: ZFS and "real"-ish storage?

Matt McLeod schrieb:
In <66jb3tF2k7dj4U17@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Ian Collins wrote:
Matt McLeod wrote:
The 2540 is pretty cheap for what it is, even if you treat it as a
JBOD. Maybe if the X4500 used fast SAS disks it'd be a better choice
(similar cost to the X4600+ST2540 combo, much more disk, enough CPU
grunt to do what we need), but not much else from the Sun lineup is.

That may not be too much of an issue, don't forget the drives in a
Thumper are spread over 6 (or is that 8?) controllers. It might be
worth your while getting one in for evaluation.

See previous comments about Sun support. They apply, unfortunately,
to our Sun account rep as well.

We've tried to get stuff for evaluation in the past, and despite being
what I guess you'd call a "mid-sized" customer -- I believe we're spending
something like AU$250,000-$500,000 on server systems, not including
storage/etc -- he's been unwilling to do anything much for us.

If we weren't constrained by decisions made by our US parent I would
not be surprised to see us looking at other vendor's gear. HP certainly
seemed interested in getting the business...

So we've simply had to make a "best guess". The Thumper is a little
riskier than the old "lots of cores plus an external storage box" approach
so despite the appeal we've gone for the more conservative option.

Matt



You can get a couple of MSA70s and hook them up to SUNs LSI SAS controller. The LSI-controller gives you JBOD and has no cache to irritate ZFS. It's supposed to be able to dodge 127 devices and 140kIOP/s.
If you're really cheap, you could try to locate somebody who is selling the LSI controller without SUN-logo (costs about half as much) - but I like the fact that our supplier can actually deliver these controllers the next day.

What hardware you use as a server is not really relevant then, you could also use HP. Or IBM. Or Dell.
We went live with an MSA70 and some 385G2 (IIRC) a couple of weeks ago for a small video-streaming site (draws between 100 and 200 Mbit/s)...

SUN is supposed to come out with some sort of JBOD-lineup themselves (in April, no less) - but I've not seen it.


cheers,
Rainer
.

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