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Home > Archive > Data Storage > April 2006 > 2-20TB solution advice needed
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2-20TB solution advice needed
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| treskewl@gmail.com 2006-04-20, 7:08 pm |
| I'm looking to build a 2TB solution scalable to about 20TB. The needs
are not numerous, and they are pretty well-defined:
1. RAID5 w/ hot-swappable drives
2. Support linux clients
3. On a budget
Performance is not very important, but reliability and availability is.
I need direction for my research:
Connection / transport medium
- FC is pretty expensive, beside springing for the FC HAs it would
require us to upgrade our servers to PCI-X-capable motherboards.
- iSCSI -- is this viable at the software level? I've looked at the
Linux-iSCSI Project, it looks promising, is it production-quality?
- Last-ditch would be to mount over network, NFS/SMB/etc.
Box(es) itself
- 500 GB SATA drives?
- I'm eying the AMCC/3ware 9550SX, which handles 8/16 drives.
However, it does not seem to support external cages. I'd love to have
the drives in an external enclosure for drives alone, are there any
options available?
- I need help in choosing the right hot-swappable SATA
trays/racks/"canisters" for a full-tower enclosure if the above cannot
be satisfied. I've seen quite a few but I don't know how good they
are, e.g. Compucase BR-SS35, Promise SuperSwap, SuperMicro CSE-M35T1
(which I assume can be used in non-SuperMicro systems), Enlight 8721,
etc.
- Is it better to run two 8-port SATA RAID Controllers instead of one
16-port? I guess the motherboard being able to handle two PCI-X cards
at full speed would matter here too.
- Ideally, it should run Linux or anything UNIX-like, not Windows.
I have thought about solutions such as JBOD (e.g. Adaptec FS4100) but I
fail to be sold on JBOD -- I'd have to do all the work on the hosts,
which is kinda backwards and doesn't solve any real problem for me.
Other solutions such as the Promise VTrak M500i look interesting.
We've looked at proper stuff such as NexSan SATABeast (and even "the
boys") and even though we'd love them, there is simply no way we can
currently afford them.
The ideal solution would be something which has a large capacity which
I can LVM into the chunks each server needs, and even LVM dedicated
backup volumes, so that storage is managed in a central place with
RAID5 redundancy. Because we can't afford something which can do this
out of the box, I'd like to build something which satisfies most of our
needs in a reliable fashion. For example, it's not possible to have a
very large volume with SATA disks simply because we're limited to 8/16
per controller, but we can get around this by adapting our software to
use multiple volumes (and there's also the 48-bit LBA 2TB limit).
Also, it's doesn't appear that I can LVM directly with any of these
except at the host OS level, so we'd have to work around this too.
Any input, specific or general, would be appreciated.
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| Some of the cheapest storage I've seen is with the Apple XServe RAID
(http://www.apple.com/xserve/raid/). It meets your three listed
requirements.
It's about $15K for 7 TB with expandable blocks.
As an alternative, look at the Storage Performance Council (SPC)
benchmark results (http://www.storageperformance.org). These are
actual SAN units.
Before you begin, gather your requirements. You have a storage number
(TB), but don't mention how many servers you want to connect and how
many I/Os the storage unit needs to support.
James
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