On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 1:30 PM, William Allen
Simpson<[email protected]> wrote:
> David Gerard wrote:
>> 2009/8/4 William Allen Simpson <[email protected]>:
>>> If you have to buy now, and are unlikely to upgrade for years, the current
>>> gold plated performance version is Sun ZFS over NetApp filers.
>>
>> Rilly? I thought they were comparable in performance but Sun was way
>> cheaper (hence the patent kerfuffle).
>>
> No idea myself.  I'm just passing along comments verbatim.  I'm pretty sure
> "gold plated" means expensive.  And I'm pretty sure NetApp wouldn't stay in
> business long for "comparable" performance.  So, a whole bunch of somebodies
> out there think that NetApp performance exceeds others.  YMMV.
>
> Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the team needs to decide whether the 2 server,
> shared, pushme-pullyou variant, without Fiber Channel (or iSCSI or whatever),
> would perform well enough to meet current needs.

All the modern filesystems (WAFL, ZFS) have odd behavior and slowdowns
as you approach full on the disk.  I've got a bunch of multi-TB pools
on Sun X4500s serving NFS and local storage, with ZFS, and have seen
consistent stable performance if we keep them less than 70-80% full.

If you want more consistent behavior near the edges plus snapshots,
you probably want to go buy Veritas / Symantec Foundation Suite - the
Volume Manager gives you multi-disk RAID and snapshots, and the VxFS
filesystem gives you growable and high-scale filesystems.

More disks and WAFL or ZFS ( just accepting a quota limit of 70% or
something, to keep it from entering the misbehavior region) is
probably cost-competitive, though.  We're in the process of buying a
bunch of X4540s with 48x500 GB drives; we expect to get something like
18 TB usable after RAID and hot spares and OS disks, and not to load
them up past about 14 TB.  About $28k each; less if you're an
educational or charitable institution.  The 750 GB and 1 TB drive
options look attractive too.


-- 
-george william herbert
[email protected]

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