[NCLUG] Terabyte Server Question

[Gary Rogers]

Actually Windows, Unix, Linux the front end doesn't matter much, what you
need is one kick but disk sub-system. When talking in the multiple Terabyte
size you're usually talking EMC, Hitachi, HP, something really serious. Now,
if you're looking to just do a big BOD (Box of Disks) that's another thing.

What the big boys give you, besides really good tools for attaching multiple
servers to one shared disk device, and great tools for moving data inside
the frame is a really really big cache in front of the disk. When I looked
at EMC devices ages ago the cache was around 1 - 2 Gigabytes, HP's Frame was
about the same two years ago. What this does is makes the disk arrays inside
the device look as close to being a solid state device as you can get
without being solid state.

Now, all that said, it sounds like you're looking for something a bit less
pricy. I just put in an IBM solution based on Fibre Channel, the FAStT 500.
It's a raid front end that attaches to disk storage and hosts oave Disk
storage, a SAN. Very cool, every expandable. I believe that it's compatible
with Linux (IBM is usually pretty good about that) as well as NT AIX,
Solaris, you name it (though check first the multiplatform support is pretty
new)

As for network connectivity, slap a fibre module in your switch and connect
the server through that. You might want to look into the pros and cons of
Samba though, It did loose the Microsoft sponsored file serving shoot out,
and while I know it can beat an NT file server it would be good to know what
you have to tweek to get the performance out of it. I'm sure there are
tradeoffs as to which kind of file system you use as well, but SGI's xfs was
always smokin for me when I used it on IRIX machines, anyone out there have
experience with it on a Linux platform?

Gary Rogers


----- Original Message -----
From: "David W. Graham" <dgraham at i3.com>
To: <nclug at nclug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2001 6:17 PM
Subject: [NCLUG] Terabyte Server Question


> Ok,  Here is one:
>
> Curently the company has been using a peer to peer network full of shared
> (Windows 98/NT/2000) hard drives.  We do lots of image processing and it
> make sense to put large images being processed on local machines.  The
> company is at the point where it now has some large data sets that are
used
> as the basis of several products.  Over time the drives on local machines
> have been upgraded to raids.  Now there is the situation where there is
> terabytes of data scattered across ~30 windows computers with no good way
to
> access it.  There is a processing trafic jam as everyone is cross sharing
> everyone elses drives for thier processing needs.
>
> So here is the question:
>
> 1) If we wanted to move some of the finished data sets to a server, what
> would that server look like?  These would be primarily read only and the
> basis for many products that the production staff would work on.  This is
> about 4 Terabytes of data.
>
> 2) How would we prevent a traffic jam right infront of the server?  The
> entire network is a switch 100 Ethernet.
>
> Our IT guy came up with a Window's solution.  I would like to introduce
> ideas that are a bit outside _that_ box.
>
> Dave Graham
> information integration and imaging, LLC.
> dgraham at i3.com
> http://www.i3.com
>
>
>
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