[nflug] Opinions on Linux and Massive Storage

[Brad Bartram]

Thanks for the thoughts.

How has ZFS been for you?  I've looked into it but never quite got the
feeling it was production ready - is that a fair assessment or am I
mistaken?

Primarilly, this is going to be server to server communications.  A
few clients that need immediate, high-speed, reliable access to big
(~100GB) data sets for processing.

The money for the sparc, at this point isn't a huge deal.  We're
already getting to the happy side of $100K to enter this project, so a
few more dollars isn't going to bust the bank.  My big thing is
scalability and reliability.  Within 12 - 18 months, I'm figuring on
seeing Petabyte size storage, so I want to make sure the ground work
is down correctly now.  It's not going to be too long before I'm over
my head on this, so when I finally do hire a storage guy (or girl) to
take the reigns, I don't want to have to backtrack - at least too
much.

I'm definitely interested in finding out more from the Hitachi rep.
You can send me his info off-list if you want.

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 1:29 PM, Darin Perusich
<Darin.Perusich at cognigencorp.com> wrote:
> I understand that you're looking for Linux opinions but I'd strongly
> recommend taking a look at Solaris 10 and ZFS, especially given what you're
> looking to scale to. Solaris runs nicely on AMD/Intel hardware so you won't
> need to be concerned with drop extra $$ on SPARC server, though given what
> you'll be spending on SAN that probably won't matter too much ;-). Samba is
> distributed with Solaris so it's fully supported by Sun and their tech
> support is fantastic. Need I mention the Sun invented NFS....
>
> On the SAN side of things take a look at Hitachi's offerings. We have a HDS
> 9570 array and this thing is bomb-proof! In the 3+ years it's been in
> production there hasn't been one failure where it needed to be taken off
> line, just about everything can be swapped hot. One of the controller boards
> had a malfunction and they swapped it hot, zero downtime! I have a Sun V480
> parked in front of it for our file server and it servers the same file
> systems to about 50 XP workstations and about the same number of Linux
> servers over NFS/CIFS.
>
> If you're interested I can send you the contact info for my local Hitachi
> rep and the local tech as well. The tech use to work for EMC and StorageTek
> so he can speak to just about all the other vender's products. He's told me
> a few whoppers about EMC that I couldn't believe.
>
> Brad Bartram wrote:
>>
>> I know there are some people in this list that have experience with
>> massive storage using linux.  By massive I mean >20TB range.
>>
>> I'd love to hear your thoughts on building out and optimizing a system
>> that is fast, scalable, and reliable.  If you have opinions on direct
>> attached storage as well as those of you running storage area
>> networks.
>>
>> It's kind of a broad topic, but I'm about to embark on a major build
>> out and want to avoid as many pitfalls as possible.
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Brad
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>
> --
> Darin Perusich
> Unix Systems Administrator
> Cognigen Corporation
> 395 Youngs Rd.
> Williamsville, NY 14221
> Phone: 716-633-3463
> Email: darinper at cognigencorp.com
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