FW: 20TB Storage System

[Max Clark]

This will be mostly Samba with a little bit of FTP.

What about the Raid 0 Stripe to combine the disk shelves, ccd or vinum? What
will I get better performance with, what should I expect as I add each
shelf?

Is there anyone out there with 5+TB of storage configured like this that
could share some performance numbers?

Thanks,
Max

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Anderson [mailto:anderson at centtech.com]
Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 12:50 PM
To: Max Clark
Cc: freebsd-performance at freebsd.org
Subject: Re: FW: 20TB Storage System


Max Clark wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I need to attach 20TB of storage to a network (as low cost as possible), I
> need to sustain 250Mbit/s or 30MByte/s of sustained IO from the storage to
> the disk.
>
> I have found external Fibre Channel -> ATA 133 Raid enclosures. These
> enclosures will house 16 drives so with 250GB drives a total of 3.5TB each
> after a RAID 5 format. These enclosures have advertised sustained IO of
> 90-100MByte/s each.
>
> One solution we are thinking about is to use a Intel XEON server with 3x
FC
> HBA controller cards in the server each attached to a separate storage
> enclosure. In any event we would be required to use ccd or vinum to stripe
> multiple storage enclosures together to form one logical volume.
>
> I can partition this system into two separate 10TB storage pools.
>
> Given the above:
> 1) What would my expected IO be using vinum to stripe the storage
enclosures
> detailed above?
> 2) What is the maximum size of a filesystem that I can present to the host
> OS using vinum/ccd? Am I limited anywhere that I am not aware of?
> 3) Could I put all 20TB on one system, or will I need two to sustain the
IO
> required?
> 4) If you were building this system how would you do it? (The installed
$/GB
> must be below $5.00 dollars).
>
> My other options are to use Solaris or Windows (which I would rather not
> do).

I can tell you right now I have Solaris and Windows machines attempting
file server traffic, and only Solaris even gets in the right realm of
speed, but FreeBSD blows them both flat over.

Your bottleneck will most likely be the bus speed of the host, so make
sure to use PCI-X adapters if possible.

Also, how are you sharing this data?  NFS?  Samba? FTP?


Eric


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Eric Anderson	   Systems Administrator      Centaur Technology
All generalizations are false, including this one.
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