I'd like to offer to debunk some of this... There are plenty of thumpers (x4500) out there in the wild deployed as OSSes under lustre. During a recent deployment using the driver that was mentioned in another post in this thread, the average single disk observed performance was just over 60MB/s with sequential 256k reads.
Here's the link to the mv_sata driver, but as you mention you will need to vary from the stock RPM's and venture into custom kernel-land. http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/downloads.jsp We see close to 1GB/s from a single thumper over IB. Your bottleneck will definitely be the bonded gigE, and you will be leaving performance on the table. -fank On Wed, 2008-04-23 at 13:05 -0400, Brock Palen wrote: > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- > Hash: SHA1 > > Thats disappointing, thanks for the input though. The paper at: > http://wiki.lustre.org/images/7/79/Thumper-BP-6.pdf > > Points out how to patch it to enable that functionality, but we want > to keep with the CFS stock kernel. > 30MB/s might be fine for us, we only plan on bonding the 4 thumber > 1Gig-e interfaces. > > Brock Palen > www.umich.edu/~brockp > Center for Advanced Computing > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > (734)936-1985 > > > > On Apr 23, 2008, at 1:00 PM, Brian Behlendorf wrote: > > > > Recently I have also been doing some linux work with the x4500 and > > I have been > > using the sata_mv driver (v0.81). The driver will properly detect > > all the > > drives and you may access them safely. However, from what I've > > seen the > > driver needs some further development work to actually perform > > well. I see > > only 30 MB/s write rates to a single disk using a simple streaming > > dd test. > > Much of this bad performance may simply be due to the fact that the > > driver > > can not enable the disk write-back cache forcing you to use write- > > thru mode. > > > > So currently the bottom line is linux will work on the x4500. But > > to get it > > working well someone is going to need to invest some development > > effort to > > improve the linux driver. > > > > Good luck, > > Brian > > > > > >> There was some discussion about the driver/module for the sata > >> controlers in the thumper (x4500) in the linux kernel. > >> > >> My question is if we bought one of these, would the CFS kernel have > >> everything needed to use the thumper in a safe way. > >> Thank You. > > _______________________________________________ > > Lustre-discuss mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss > > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- > Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (Darwin) > > iD8DBQFID2xmMFCQB4Bvz5QRAsDCAJ44d0zU+fUlQkEASgc3M6JBciYgdQCfaUUM > r2VnAo6S0Tj3+qGYCoKrcGE= > =Xw7Q > -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- > _______________________________________________ > Lustre-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss _______________________________________________ Lustre-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lustre.org/mailman/listinfo/lustre-discuss
