Hi, first post, eek... I co-run a small post-production facility in London. What started as 2 guys on laptops has grown within a year to 4 workstations, 2 laptops and a 7 machine render farm. As such, I think its time we retire our overworked 500gb linkstation, which I'm amazed has made it this far. I setup a temp animation facility at the BBC 2 years ago and got burned by terrible performance and angry animators. I'm trying to make sure that doesn't happen again, and hopefully have a system that'll let us expand in future.
Opensolaris+ZFS seems to be ideal for our needs in terms of snapshots, fault tolerance and expandability, so I've been costing out options. We have ?4000 to spend, and quiet operation is a major concern for us (no seperate machine room!), so here's my thinking: -Dell Precision 390 or T3400 (same as our workstations), 4gb Ram. Its quiet, lots of room, relatively cheap, and its on the HCL list. ?700 -4 x 1TB western digital WD1000FYPS drives, silent. ?436 -4 port intel gig-ethernet nic, ?360 -opensolaris support, ?630 -48 port hp 2810 switch, ?1500. Also fairly quiet, lots of room to expand. Thats a total of ?3516, and moves us from a 100mbit network and dying linkstation to gigabit and a roomy new server. I think the hardware side is ok (within our budget!), but I'm curious about ZFS configs. I had planned to use raidZ, but have since read it might impact performance. We don't expect to edit HD video in realtime, but would like consistently better performance than we have now. So, questions. I know unix as an end user rather than as an admin, so excuse my stupidity: 1. In this config what will choke first under heavy load, the network or the disks? 2. Would 2 raidz mirrors be a better option? 3. Should we look at 8x500gb disks rather than 4x1tb disks instead? 4. We're windows based, does that have any bearing on performance? 5. I've heard conflicting reports about performance with link aggregation, is it wishful thinking to expect 4, 3 or even twice the speed of a single port? 6. Later we might look into splitting the load across several machines, but ideally the workstations and farm should see no change in terms of directory structure. What is the technology I should be reading up on? iSCSI? Lustre? Something else? 7. Is the UK opensolaris support from sun worth the money? 7. Any solaris experts in london willing to help an inept 3d animator? Any advice appreciated! Cheers, -matt This message posted from opensolaris.org
