On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:30 PM, William Allen
Simpson<william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
David Gerard wrote:
2009/8/4 William Allen Simpson
<william.allen.simpson(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com