> I think what he means is: > You are given an inordinate amount of harddrives and some computers to > house them. > If plan9 is your only software, how would it be configured overall, > given that it has to perform as well, or better. > > Or put another way: your boss wants you to compete with backblaze using > only plan9 and (let's say) a _large_ budget. Go!
forgive me for thinking in ruts ... i wouldn't ask the question just like that. the original plan 9 fileserver had a practically-infinite storage system. it was a jukebox. the jukebox ran some firmware that wasn't plan 9. (in fact the fileserver itself wasn't running plan 9.) today, jukeboxes are still ideal in some ways, but they're too expensive. i personally think you can replace the juke with a set of aoe shelves. you can treat the shelves as if they were jukebox platters. add as necessary. this gives you an solid, redundant foundation. for a naive first implementation targeting plan 9 clients, i would probablly start with ken's fs. for coraid's modest requirements (10e2 users 10e2 terminals 10e1 cpu servers 10e2 mb/s), i built this http://www.quanstro.net/plan9/disklessfs.pdf i don't see any fundamental reasons why it would not scale up to petabytes. i would put work into enabling multiple cpus. i would imagine it wouldn't be hard to saturate 2x10gbe with such a setup. of course, there is no reason one would need to limit oneself to a single file server, other than simplicity. of course this is all a bunch of hand waving without any money or specific requirements. - erik
