24TB was the original limit when 500GB drives were the largest you could fit to them. I've been advised by a couple of people at Sun that they plan to keep extending the Thumper range, and don't see a problem with fitting 2GB or even 4GB drives to these in the future.
So while 48TB is the limit today, 196TB should be possible in a few more years :) Regarding the raid, etc, ZFS handles all of that, and if you're asking questions like that you really need to do a bit more reading up on ZFS and probably have a play with it before you commit to one of these. To give an example, with ZFS you could configure the 48 drives in a thumper something like this: 1 drive for boot 1 drive for boot mirror 2 drives for hot spares 44 drives for storage, split into 4 raid-z2 pools of 11 disks each. Which would give a grand total of around 18TB usable from a 24TB thumper (minus a bit for ZFS overhead). But this is just one example, the actual data pool can be split in many ways, you can do mirrors, dual parity mirrors, raid-z, raid-z2. You can combine sets of anywhere from 3 to 11 disks (you could do more, but smaller pools are recommended for performance). One key point is that the performance you will see can depend heavily on how you configure the storage pool. Mirrored performance is very different to raid-z performance for example. You also need to be thinking about dual parity with such large disks. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
