I originally sent this off list. But, as the conversation seems to have come around this way...
-- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 10:56:11 -0400 (EDT) From: Joshua Baker-LePain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: questions about proposed amanda hardware solution On Fri, 11 Oct 2002 at 9:00am, Mike Simpson wrote > The amanda control host would be a smallish Linux rackmount job with > attached SCSI+RAID disk enclosure -- currently I'm considering a Dell > PowerEdge 1650 (1U, PIII-based) with a Dell PowerVault 220S (3U, 14 x > 36 GB Ultra160 SCSI disks + PERC/3 RAID controller). Doing a RAID-5 + > hot spare across the fourteen disks would give me 400 "real" GB > (1024^3) of holding disk. I'd use RedHat Linux 7.3 for the OS. Main > reason for picking Dell and RedHat over other PC/Linux options is just > that they're the standard for my group these days. For a tape library How much is cost vs. storage space an issue? If it matters a fair bit, you may want to think about going with an IDE solution (the crowd gasps). I recently bought one of these: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/sm-416r.php Mine is actually based on dual Xeons (rather than PIII). It's maxed out with 16 x 160GB 5400RPM Maxtor disks, 2 3ware 7500-8 controllers, and 4GB of memory, which all cost $11K back in August. Doing a RAID5 w/ hot spare on each controller, that gets me 1.92TB of available disk space, amounting to $5.72/MB. The SCSI solution above (based on the pricing I get from Dell) costs $19.32/MB. You could easily scale back the IDE solution -- PIIIs rather than Xeons, less memory, smaller disks -- and get the absolute cost under the SCSI system and still get far more storage. Or, max it out and use the storage for other stuff as well. Note that the 3ware controllers and the chassis do support hot swap. And, if you're worried about speed, my system gets (doing a software RAID0 stripe across the two controllers) 105MB/s writing and 330MB/s reading (bonnie++). :) I sent this off list since it has less to do with amanda than with disk storage. Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with libraries, although given the system above, another 1TB system for another group, and our first .56TB RAID, I'm looking at AIT3 based libraries as well (I have an AIT1 drive and it's worked rather well). If you didn't want to hear this, sorry for the unsolicited, unrelated advice. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
