Diligent readers will recall the thread a few weeks ago on slow disk performance with a PATA XRaid system from Apple (HFS, RAID5). Having evaluated the situation, we're looking to get a new file server that combines some fast disk with some bulk storage. We have a busy web server that is mostly occupied with serving static content (read only access), some dynamic content (Django portal with mod_python/httpd), and then scientific compute users who do lots of writes (including a 100 core cluster).
We have about a $10k budget (ideally $8k). The current plan looks roughly like this: AMD quad socket MB 1x12-core AMD CPU 8 GB RAM 2x160 GB 7200 RPM SATA drives for system software 11x300 GB 15000 RPM SAS2 fast storage (RAID10 + 1 hot swap, 1.5 TB volume) 5x2 TB 7200 RPM SATA drives (RAID10 + 1 hot swap, 4 TB volume) A 3U chassis will be filled, and the 4U chassis will have some empty bays. We can also upgrade processors and RAM as funds become available and the need arises. This will support a compute cluster (~100 cores), 10-20 users (typically 3-4 active), and a busy web server. Besides the obvious question of whether this setup is sensible/cost efficient (mixing two kinds of storage, etc.), the main unknowns we have are: 1. Should we consider running a VM on this same server and host e.g. the web server on a VM which accesses files through the virtualization layer, rather than a physical network interconnect. 2. What combination of network filesystem and local file system combination makes sense? (currently NFS + ext4 is on the cards) 3. Should we consider alternatives to GigE for interconnect. 4. How can we estimate our IOPs and throughput requirements? 5. Perspectives on SLC SSDs vs. SAS2 w/ 15k drives, since we could probably transfer the 11x300 GB SAS2 drive budget to a collection of SSDs and live with the reduced storage if that was expected to have a big performance benefit. Thanks in advance for any opinions on this. Ian
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