On Oct 25, 2004, at 11:11 AM, Michael Gale wrote:
Hello,
We are currently looking for a shared storage solution and have been meeting with IBM about a SAN. All though a SAN is nice I want to be able to offer a cheaper solution.
I was looking at Apple's new Xserver RAID using ATA drives and I was also reading up on GFS. I understand that neither may offer the speed / performance of a SAN.
The Apple RAID has an FC external interface, right? So, hooking that up to your fabric would provide you with a SAN. I have no idea how their setup interface works -- perhaps web based. Although these devices have two controllers, I don't think they are "active-active" - so don't think that that provides any redundancy.
But does any body have any specs on GFS through put ?? or any ATA type share storage device ?
I don't have any concrete data on throughput for your above questions. However, I don't see why ATA drives wouldn't perform well behind an FC controller.
GFS performance is tough to quantify. Alot of it depends on the type of work load you have on your cluster. When contention is low, GFS has been shown to scale near linearly with the number of machines. When contention is high, performance suffers. In general, you might use GFS in an HPC environment for performance reasons or you may use it for other applications for HA reasons. Using a cluster file system wisely is like programming multi-threaded apps - just because you have multiple threads doesn't mean things will run faster - it's how you structure the work load. The more intrinsic contention points you have, the more tuning will be required.
In the end, it may be wise to set-up a test environment and see if your envisioned solution performs as required.
brassow
