Re: SCSI Disk Farm
On Fri, 3 Jul 1998, Michael Laing wrote: This success has lead us to experiment with 'electronic portfolios' in which kids create a multimedia record of things they create over the school year. We are just starting to burn CD's for each of them so they can take their portfolios home (and we can archive their work). However, it looks like we need to allocate .5-1 GB per kid for working storage...2500 kids in 7 schools...200-1000GB per school... Yeesh. I'd like your budget. :- At any rate, we want to pilot a debian-based disk farm at the high school, particularly to support the video program in the fall. For this sort of thing, you're going to want to go with external SCSI-RAID setups. So far as Linux is concerned, it's just a large disk. Both DPT and Mylex make these, and maybe others. Some are configured with special software on the Linux box, some use a separate dumb terminal hooked to the external enclosure. I am thinking of building a system based on a dual PII BX motherboard, I don't have experience with systems this large, but serving and storing data is not usually processor-bound, but instead disk- and RAM-bound. You could probably get away with spending less on processor and more on RAM and *good* SCSI controllers. This is a good rule of thumb with most things involving Linux anyway. You could ask on linux-net about any issues involved in 100MB Ethernet. ISTR hearing about needing a fast enough processor to serve all those interrupts, but for a pure disk farm, I think dual-PII may be overkill. (Of course, if money's not tight, what the heck, go for it.) I don't have any 100MB experience. :- Just a lowly 10MB coax net at home... Sincerely, Ray Ingles (248) 377-7735 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Rearranging his entire personal universe in the light of startling new data is what he does for fun. Spider Robinson, on the Science Fiction reader -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: SCSI Disk Farm
I want to experiment with 'raidtools' to set up my disk farm (100-200GB) and it requires a kernel version 2.1.62. I haven't worked with experimental kernels before - where is a good place to get them and how would I pick one that is not TOO experimental, i.e. doesn't break too easily... Had almost a month with .101 and currently second week going with .106+ ac4 patches. As for _large_ raid, I'd say DPT or Mylex and external boxes. Means the boxes connect to SCSI controller and they are seen as very large disks. These also do not need any drivers beside the SCSI-controller. --j -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: SCSI Disk Farm
Michael Laing [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: I want to experiment with 'raidtools' to set up my disk farm (100-200GB) and it requires a kernel version 2.1.62. I haven't worked with experimental kernels before - where is a good place to get them and how would I pick one that is not TOO experimental, i.e. doesn't break too easily... Michael With older kernels, you can use mdutils and still do RAID 0 (?) striping. If you want to try a new kernel, I've have a machine up for about 2 weeks running 2.1.104, and had no problems. Later, Dale -- + finger for pgp public key -+ | Dale E. Martin | Clifton Labs, Inc. | Senior Computer Engineer| | [EMAIL PROTECTED]|http://www.clifton-labs.com | +--+ -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
Re: SCSI Disk Farm
I want to experiment with 'raidtools' to set up my disk farm (100-200GB) and it requires a kernel version 2.1.62. I haven't worked with experimental kernels before - where is a good place to get them and how would I pick one that is not TOO experimental, i.e. doesn't break too easily... Michael -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
SCSI Disk Farm
I volunteer assistance at several local schools in our rural district and we have been very successful in setting up debian linux-based servers that employ apache, squid, netatalk (for mac file sharing), and samba (for windows file and printer sharing). This success has lead us to experiment with 'electronic portfolios' in which kids create a multimedia record of things they create over the school year. We are just starting to burn CD's for each of them so they can take their portfolios home (and we can archive their work). However, it looks like we need to allocate .5-1 GB per kid for working storage...2500 kids in 7 schools...200-1000GB per school... Additionally, we have set up a very successful film/video/animation program at the high school which is expanding there and being introduced at lower grades - it has higher per student working storage requirements. At any rate, we want to pilot a debian-based disk farm at the high school, particularly to support the video program in the fall. I am thinking of building a system based on a dual PII BX motherboard, e.g. Supermicro, and then stringing a lot of SCSI disks on it, I guess in 1 or 2 separate enclosures... I would like to use RAID 5, maybe with the raidtools package (?). The system will NOT be used for video capture, instead students will work on local machines and use the server to store and retrieve their current work. I will tweak the network infrastructure accordingly with switches and 100MB links. I'd like this system to handle 100-200GB. Does anyone have any pointers or words of wisdom about this? We are always looking for the cheapest alternative, but management time is expensive and this data is valuable, so I am preferring a BIG SCSI server solution over the herd of smaller IDE-based servers we currently use. Michael Laing -- Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] /dev/null
