Andrew> while i am no stranger to large data, i have found myself Andrew> outside my comfort zone at work. the department i have joined Andrew> (i lateralled within research) has traditionally used Sun as Andrew> mid-range storage and Hitachi as their high-end.
Andrew> we now need to look at multi-PB disk systems (say 2-5PB), Andrew> which i have always thought of as a different market, with Andrew> players like Parnasas. as normal, we care rather less about Andrew> IOPS and more about bandwidth and $ per TB. What are your requirements for this storage? Do you want just one large filesystem spanning it all? Do you need multiple clients accessing the storage in a streaming mode (as I suspect from your comments) or are you looking at a more random access workload? I've been a Netapp user for a long time, but they won't scale anywhere near this level at all. I've been talking with Isilon and they really tempt me alot. I especially like how you can just add storage by dropping chassis into their Infiniband cluster backend and it just grows without you having to do anything. Of course once you hit their switch limit, it's a bit harder to expand I suspect. Curious about your backup strategy, and reliability needs too. I know this is archaic technology, but would some sort of tape library backend fronted by and HSM solution work for your data and workflow? Any chance you write another Usenix/LISA paper describing your work? Always fascinating to read about large deployments like this. Cheers, John _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
