On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:30 PM, William Allen Simpsonwilliam.allen.simpson@gmail.com wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/8/4 William Allen Simpson william.allen.simpson@gmail.com:
If you have to buy now, and are unlikely to upgrade for years, the current gold plated performance version is Sun ZFS over NetApp filers.
Rilly? I thought they were comparable in performance but Sun was way cheaper (hence the patent kerfuffle).
No idea myself. I'm just passing along comments verbatim. I'm pretty sure "gold plated" means expensive. And I'm pretty sure NetApp wouldn't stay in business long for "comparable" performance. So, a whole bunch of somebodies out there think that NetApp performance exceeds others. YMMV.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the team needs to decide whether the 2 server, shared, pushme-pullyou variant, without Fiber Channel (or iSCSI or whatever), would perform well enough to meet current needs.
All the modern filesystems (WAFL, ZFS) have odd behavior and slowdowns as you approach full on the disk. I've got a bunch of multi-TB pools on Sun X4500s serving NFS and local storage, with ZFS, and have seen consistent stable performance if we keep them less than 70-80% full.
If you want more consistent behavior near the edges plus snapshots, you probably want to go buy Veritas / Symantec Foundation Suite - the Volume Manager gives you multi-disk RAID and snapshots, and the VxFS filesystem gives you growable and high-scale filesystems.
More disks and WAFL or ZFS ( just accepting a quota limit of 70% or something, to keep it from entering the misbehavior region) is probably cost-competitive, though. We're in the process of buying a bunch of X4540s with 48x500 GB drives; we expect to get something like 18 TB usable after RAID and hot spares and OS disks, and not to load them up past about 14 TB. About $28k each; less if you're an educational or charitable institution. The 750 GB and 1 TB drive options look attractive too.