Ian> On 8/26/10 1:19 PM, Rudie, Tony wrote: >> I would recommend an NFS appliance in this case, (and actually in every >> case, mine included) either from NetApp or Sun or someone else. Simpler >> than dealing with a general purpose OS. You still have to deal with a >> new platform for monitoring and backups, but everything else will be a >> little easier than building it yourself.
Ian> We have a $10k budget, so I don't think we can afford any Ian> "appliance" solution, unless someone knows otherwise. For $10k Ian> it looks like we can get: Ian> 2x4core 2.4 GHz Intel Nehalems Why are you going for extra cores? Or have you looked at Opterons/AMD solutions as well? You don't need killer CPU performance from a file server, but lots of bandwidth to the disks/network. Ian> 3U 16 bay chassis w/ SAS2 extender for expansion storage shelves What kind of power supplies are you getting here? And are they redundant and hot-swappable by any chance? Ian> 24 GB RAM Seems like overkill for a file server, because you don't want to cache that much of your data in RAM unless you have a rock solid UPS, etc. And RAM isn't cheap. 4 to 8 would be a better fit in my book. Ian> 4 TB RAID10 storage + hot swap (SATA 6 GB/s, 10k RPM drives) Ian> 1.2 TB RAID10 storage + hot swap (SAS2 6 GB/s, 15k RPM drives) Ian> 2 port TOE Intel GigE NIC Which interface will the GigE ports be on? Remember, that's 120MB/sec per port MAXIMUM bandwidth. Even if you bond them together, you'll be pushed to get more than 200MB/sec through them. Which isn't chicken feed mind you! But I suspect alot of your traffic will be NFS get_attr calls and such, so being able to keep alot of the inode cache in RAM might be helpful there for lookups like that. This does go against my recomendation above for RAM, but not really since the inode cache isn't all that big. Ian> Adaptec MaxIQ SAS2 RAID controller with 64 GB SSD read cache and BBU What interface is it using? PCIe 4x, 8x or what? And can you afford a second one (instead of extra RAM) for better redundancy and performance. You want to spread your IO load across as many controllers/spindles that you can afford. Ian> 600 GB SATA 10k RPM system drive Why not a pair (or three with one hot spare) of mirrored smaller drives for the OS? You also haven't mentioned which OS you want to run. Have you looked at FreeNAS? It has ZFS builtin on a FreeBSD core. Seems solid, though a little annoying to administer to actually create volumes until you wrap your brain around their setup. And in that case, I'd just get a pair of CF cards and boot the system off Flash, which reduces where things can go wrong. Also, how will user accounts be mapped on this sucker? NIS, LDAP? There's another area to think about. With a box this beefy, I'd make it an NIS slace or an LDAP replica at the drop of a hat. It's got tons of spare performance. As for filesystems, I'm comfortable with ext3, thinking about ext4 or xfs (leaning more this way) on linux and ZFS on FreeBSD. John _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
