Supermicro 836 - cracking case, I'm using two of them at our place now. If you're after a Solaris compatible motherboard, the H8DM3-2 is on the HCL and I've got one running OpenSolaris at the moment. Check this supermicro page if you want to see if it fits the 936: http://www.supermicro.com/aplus/motherboard/Opteron2000/MCP55/H8DM3-2.cfm
Regarding the configuration, I'd personally set up 8 mirrors on the raid cards, and stripe them in ZFS. Your rebuild times will be horrendous otherwise - rebuilding 8TB of data if a single disk fails... not good! I'm also having problems at the moment with hot swap and ZFS, so letting the raid hardware deal with that may not be a bad idea. You also say $2,200 for a 'few' drives. Bear in mind that if you use ZFS for raid-z or raid-z2 (definately recommended for the error correction btw, even with hardware raid!) you can't expand a raid array in ZFS. You're either talking about restoring from a backup, or breaking the mirrors, creating new stripes and hoping no disks fail as you re-sync. Either way it's going to be painful. You could just stripe the mirrors in ZFS, but bear in mind you then have no protection if ZFS finds data errors. Also, while you can add disks to a stripe, in time your performance will suffer: as you expand, some data will be striped over just a few drives instead of all of them, and it'll get worse as the disks get full. I can't say about the adaptec drivers, I'd check the Solaris HCL. I think I've heard 3ware and Arcea mentioned on the forums, and I've heard good things about Areca. http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/ And yeah, the Thumpers are great, but not quite comparable to the NetApp for features yet. About 3x better on price and performance though... :D Ross This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
