I just purchased an equallogic SAN with 16 1TB drives for 52k at work.
Love it, scheduled snapshots, thin provisioning, iscsi only but fairly
swift at 16 spindles in a RAID 50.
Jason
www.cyborgworkshop.org
John R Pierce wrote:
> Ed Morrison wrote:
>> Hi:
>>
>> I need advice on implementing a storage server. I really do not have
>> the $ to spend for a Dell iSCSI storage divice and I am thinking
>> trunning CentOS 5.x with ftp or FreeNAS. Here is what I am looking at
>> and concerned about.
>>
>> Situation:
>> My current storage needs are approximately 1.5 TB annually. This will
>> increase to about 3.5 TB annually over the next 5 years (rough est.).
>> This box will just be a data archive and once it is full it will only
>> be used very infrequently if not used at all. Files are small up to 10
>> MB but numerous.
>>
>
> infrastructure to support lots of SATA drives isn't real cheap
> regardless. you really don't want to just bolt a bunch of drives up
> inside a jumbo desktop tower and call it a server. 5 years at that
> run rate is going to be something like 12TB total storage, which using
> commodity 500GB SATA drives in raid10 will take around 48 drives.
> Thats a lot of SATA channels...
>
> With that many spindles, you'll also want to allocate several hot spares.
>
> I dislike raid5 for a number of reasons, and would recommend sticking
> with mirroring, eg raid1 or raid10. You /never/ want to build a raid5
> much over about 6-8 disks, or the raid rebuild times get ridiculous and
> double drive failures will lose huge amounts of storage.
>
>
> hey, have you considered the Sun x4500 ? its a 4U(?) dual dualcore
> opteron server that comes with 48 x 500GB SATA drives. ***
>
>
>> CentOS:
>> Upgrading to the newer CentOS flavors. I will not have the ability to
>> archive this data to tape and I am concerned about loosing the data
>> when upgrading the OS. How best to handle this?
>>
> as others have said, as long as your critical data is on seperate file
> systems, there should be no issue here.
>
>> Storage limitation. It is my understanding that there is a 2 TB
>> storage limitation with Linux (and windows) in general particularly
>> for stability. I see that ReiserFS can go up to 16 TB. Is any one
>> using this? If so, how has it been for you?
>>
>
> since your data is archival in nature, it really shouldn't be that hard
> to manage it as multiple 2 TB chunks on seperate file systems. when
> you fill 2TB, take 8 x 500GB more SATA drives, raid10 them, and mount
> them as another file system, /u01, /u02, .... keep an index file
> somewhere which logs which backups are where.
>
>
>>
>> FreeNAS
>> Anyone using FreeNAS? What is your experience? How easy is it to add
>> new drives and keep your data? Upgrading to newer versions?
>
> I setup OpenFiler once, that worked quite nicely, supported NFS, SMB,
> and iSCSI, and was pretty easy to use. I'd have to assume FreeNAS is
> similar.
>
>
>
> *** heresy (for this list), Solaris 10, with its ZFS file system, is
> extremely good at handling very large storage configurations like this.
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