On Tue, 8 Mar 2011, Doug Hughes wrote:
> One final thing to look at would be Nexenta. It's basically and OpenSolaris > kernel (zfs, dtrace, deduplication, integrity checksums, etc.) with a Debian > Linux user space. You can put Nexenta on whatever hardware you want. We're > evalutating on some Supermicro hardware. They will support this and will > charge based upon #TB of storage for support. You can get < ~20TB for nothing > (support yourself). The big win is ZFS integrity checking, and inexpensive > disk. Combine this with some reasonable flash drives for ZIL (X-25E, OCZ, > RevoDrive-x2, etc) and you've got a pretty darn fast and inexpensive large > block storage filesystem with snapshots and a really good backup story. We're > evaluating nexenta on some supermicro boxes that have 36x2TB drives in the > main chassis (4u) and 47x2TB drives in an expansion chassis (also 4U) > connected with 6Gbit SAS. That's ~160TB disk in 8U. You need to check the > cooling angle since half the disks are in the hot aisle. In our place, it > shouldn't be a problem. We're using the revodrive x2 PCI card internal to > the Supermicro boxes as the boot/ZIL device and the 2TB as data. Setup is > still in progress. If you plan to buy a lot of these I can put you in touch > with our cluster vendor who will build them to spec and charge a small markup > for assembly and hardware support/RMA. > +1 for Nexenta, either using NexentaCore (NCP) to roll your own, or using NexentaStor if you want a supported appliance with enterprise features like active/active HA failover. We have been using the Supermicro 36 and 45 bay chassis in production for D2D for over six months. We've used NCP on Thumper X4500s for over three years, as well as X4240 head nodes with J4400 JBODs. We're getting ready to consolidate all of this onto new 60-bay 4U units from DataOn (http://www.dataonstorage.com/) which is also a Nexenta partner. We have used X25-E SSDs for ZIL although recently our demand for IOPs went up, so we have been testing Fusion-io cards. They obviously cost more but work as advertised, being able to push up to 100K IOPs and without the eventual slow down of an SSD. The only downside to the PCI-e cards is that it is difficult to do automatic HA failover. DataOn is now reselling the Zeus STEC SSDs (they call it zeusRAM) that are used in the Sun 7000 series and they cost a little less than a baseline Fusion-io card with nearly all the benefits. -phillip _______________________________________________ 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/
