Re: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
On Wed, 30 Jun 2004 11:16:02 -0700, Jay Tortorelli [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'll chime in a say that I have had great success setting up Qmail/Vpopmail/etc that stores on an nfs mount from a two machine mirror using drbd/heartbeat to provide mirroring and failover. http://www.drbd.org/ Using commodity hardware, it really does save you a lot of money over the Netapps with clustering and I wouldn't even consider it a gamble...just based on my experiences. Jay I played with drbd when it was first being developed but haven't touched it since. I am just curious if have any statistics on the max and average NFS operations per second your drbd/nfs host is doing? At a previous job we had NetApp 840 Filers and were doing 35k nfs op/sec on average with spikes to 60k. -- Sean
RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
Sorry for the delay on this.. We've got two F740. They're setup in an active-passive scenario with a VIP (virtual ip). What they call snap mirrors are made every minute. So basically the slave filer mirrors the master filer every minute. The chance of a filer head blowing out is really slim to none, so you could start with one filer. We currently handle about 800+ domains at the moment, some of which have 400-500 accounts. We have it hooked into a Cisco 3550 switch. Sorry for the delay, got busy :). -Clayton -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 3:53 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance) NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster. SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for. I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for this purpose to share your wisdom. What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ? Thanks a lot. Lu From: Clayton Weise [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. That's great to hear. Can you let me know the specific model you are using ? How many domains are you currently handling with the above unit ? Also, do you have any redundancy capability in case that box goes down ? Thanks again Clayton Lu
RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
Thank you to : Clayton Weise Mike Horwath Nick Harring Rainer Duffner Jay Tortorelli for your feedback and insight into this. I will now use those information to go on from there. Regards, Lu
RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
Title: RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster On Tue, 2004-06-29 at 17:52, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance) NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster. SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for. I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for this purpose to share your wisdom. What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ? Thanks a lot. Lu From: Clayton Weise [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. That's great to hear. Can you let me know the specific model you are using ? How many domains are you currently handling with the above unit ? Also, do you have any redundancy capability in case that box goes down ? Thanks again Clayton Lu I'm running a clustered pair of F820s in production, however those are end of lifed models if I'm not mistaken. With NetApps be prepared to spend serious cash, they are not cheap. When I was pricing mine out, a year or so ago, there were no ata based devices, and they said they had no intent to build such units. Procomm has ATA/SATA based devices, and an excellent rep (disclaimer being that a relative of mine used to sell their devices). NetApps are some of the priciest devices around, however their reliability, performance and support are pretty much unmatched. I've had zero hiccups since deploying in production, and the performance absolutely clobbers the previous Solaris/SCSI based solution I was using. I've got about a dozen domains, 85K mailboxes and about 600K messages/day that's only putting about 20% load on my netapps. Hope that Helps, Nick Harring Webley Systems
Re: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance) NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster. SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for. I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for this purpose to share your wisdom. What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ? Thanks a lot. Lu From: Clayton Weise [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. That's great to hear. Can you let me know the specific model you are using ? They recently introduced some lower-end models that cannot be expanded to such a high degree and also may lack clustering-support, depending on the exact model. They run a real-time OS, but can be accessed via ssh and a web-interface. NetApp is really the high-end of storage, but also from a price-viewpoint. But if you have enough customers and/or pretty strict SLAs, there's hardly a choice, unless you want to gamble ;-) How many domains are you currently handling with the above unit ? Also, do you have any redundancy capability in case that box goes down ? The clustering-software is very expensive - and you've got to buy a 2nd NetApp, too. ;-) Ask a local NetApp distributor for more info. Rainer
Re: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
On Wed, 2004-06-30 at 08:36, Rainer Duffner wrote: NetApp is really the high-end of storage, but also from a price-viewpoint. But if you have enough customers and/or pretty strict SLAs, there's hardly a choice, unless you want to gamble ;-) The clustering-software is very expensive - and you've got to buy a 2nd NetApp, too. ;-) I'll chime in a say that I have had great success setting up Qmail/Vpopmail/etc that stores on an nfs mount from a two machine mirror using drbd/heartbeat to provide mirroring and failover. http://www.drbd.org/ Using commodity hardware, it really does save you a lot of money over the Netapps with clustering and I wouldn't even consider it a gamble...just based on my experiences. Jay
RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 12:44 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance) NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster. SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for. I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for this purpose to share your wisdom. What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ? Thanks a lot. Lu
RE: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
I am looking around for a suitable (ie, reasonably priced and performance) NAS unit in order to convert a bunch of standalone servers into a cluster. SATA RAID units seem to be what I am looking for. I would appreciate those out there who have experience using NAS boxes for this purpose to share your wisdom. What are you using ? How has it been working for you ? Any performance issues during busy times etc ? Thanks a lot. Lu From: Clayton Weise [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. That's great to hear. Can you let me know the specific model you are using ? How many domains are you currently handling with the above unit ? Also, do you have any redundancy capability in case that box goes down ? Thanks again Clayton Lu
Re: [vchkpw] SATA NAS for vpop cluster
On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 02:29:55PM -0700, Clayton Weise wrote: We use netapps (www.netapp.com) and it works great. One of the big things that made me move towards the netapp in place of many of the other NAS units out there was the fact that it runs a nix based OS. Most of the ones, say.. Dell for example just run a stripped down version of windows with file sharing for unix. It doesn't give you the ability to make any tweaks to the nfs server. We've been using the netapps for about 6 months now and it's been awesome. A client that hosts in our datacenter turned us on to the netapps nas units. He's been using them for I think about 2 years now and swears by them. Well, I have been using NetApp systems since 1997. They are absolutely wonderful systems. BUT They do not run any type of UNIX system, they run something called Data OnTap, current revision is 6.5. There are many models available. My old employer still has a F210 in production, this system is a Pentium 75 with 128MB of RAM using non-Ultra wide SCSI. It houses the RCS based configurations for the whole ISP. My old employer has a F720 in production for UNIX home directories and commercial webhosting data space. My old employer has a F720 in production for UNIX home directories and CIFS shares for the staff. My old employer has a F760 in production for UNIX home directories for the storage of mail in Maildir format, using Courier-IMAP for IMAP and POP3 access, Postfix as MTA/LDA. One small area is handled by vpopmail but that area is being phased out because of the qmail requirements. 30K mailboxes, 6000+ DSL accounts, many hundreds of T1s and colo customers - the NetApp systems ROCK for storage of critical data. But it doesn't run any kind of UNIX :) Oh, and good NetApp systems use Fibre-Channel drives, there are some newer systems that *look* like they might be ATA based, but I haven't played with them. Their near-storage systems (R series) is ATA based, but is not a general fileserver. Looking for cheaper than NetApp? http://www.winsys.com/products/flata.php Then use your favorite of UNIX systems (FreeBSD preferred by me) to be your NFS server OS of choice. Simple. Mostly cheap. Tell them I sent you. -- Mike Horwath, reachable via [EMAIL PROTECTED]
