How much data are you talking about? How much money do you have to spend on this project? Are you looking to use SCSI, Fiber Channel, External SATA or I-SCSI?
With RAID-5 you can get around the small read/write I/O issue with large amounts of cache on your RAID controller. If a vendor is trying to sell a product and you are looking at several different products. You should try and get the vendor (vendors) to let you do some read/write I/O tests on there products. Then compare the results of the tests from each vendor and what ever configuration be it SCSI, Fiber Channel, SATA or I-SCSI. You can use Bonnie++ or IOzone to get performance data. I would recommend trying different file systems on the RAID volume to see what types of performance differences there are. Unless you are going to use a RAW device to store your data. Then you don't have to try the different file systems. You should also run what ever bench marking tool on your current system. IOzone has a nice Excel VBscript / Macro script that creates nice 3D Graphs from the text output. You can also create your own graphs. I have used both in the past to get performance data for a EVA5000 and XP12000 disk arrays with various RAID configurations, sizes and file systems on Linux and HP-UX hosts. http://freshmeat.net/projects/bonnie/ http://freshmeat.net/projects/iozone/ Mike Miller _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
